the clown show

Every once in a while I'm reminded of why I mostly have chosen to avoid political subjects in this space any more.

It's not that U.S. politics is unimportant; it's simply too disgusting and depressing to ponder much. A passing glance at the New York Times front page and a cursory daily read of Atrios's blog is sufficient to remind me of why political topics are hazardous to my emotional health and sense of balance.

For example, the Times this morning reports that Despite recent fluctuations in global temperature year to year, which fueled claims of global cooling, a sustained global warming trend shows no signs of ending, according to new analysis by the World Meteorological Organization made public on Tuesday.

The decade of the 2000s is very likely the warmest decade in the modern record, dating back 150 years, according to a provisional summary of climate conditions near the end of 2009, the organization said.

However, such evidence isn't good enough for the U.S. Senate, whose Republicans, along with a sizable contingent of Democrats, continue to view global warming as overestimated at best, and at worst a hoax. Sen. James Inhofe (Asshat-Oklahoma) says of the EPA's recent decision to regulate greenhouse gases if Congress fails to do so, that EPA's finding will have no impact on global warming because India and China, leading emitters of greenhouse gases, are left out. "So, our jobs and our emissions will move to countries that have few if any environmental requirements,'' he said.

Inhofe is one of the loudest and most ludicrous of the Senate cohort of global warming deniers.

No topic is serious enough to escape the ham-handed lies cooked up at the clown show. We're still getting daily doses of overheated, capital-fueled hysteria about how the country will go broke if we enact universal health care legislation. Meanwhile, more civilized nations have had comprehensive health insurance for all their citizens for over a hundred years, while the debate here has been raging intermittently since 1915.

To truly comprehend why anyone with heightened sensitivities might find himself or herself unable to contemplate political matters much longer than five minutes at a time, however, it's necessary to take a walk down memory lane, as Jonathan Schwarz does this morning in a post titled "How the Crock of Shit Gets to Your Breakfast Table."

Each morning Rupert Murdoch's media delivers a warm, steaming crock of shit to the world's people. How does it happen? To understand, let's take a look at one particular crock of shit, from September 24, 2002.

On that day, Murdoch's tabloid The Sun (readership eight million) ran a giant front page headline about Saddam Hussein's terrifying WMD:

HE'S GOT 'EM
LET'S GET HIM

Then on the inside of the paper, the headline was:

BRITS 45mins FROM DOOM

The Sun stories were based on a dossier released by the British government about Saddam Hussein's terrifying WMD. In it Tony Blair stated that "[Saddam's] military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them." This was so important the dossier repeated it three more times. That day Blair told parliament that the intelligence the dossier was based on was "extensive, detailed and authoritative."

So what was the ultimate source for this claim? The British media is reporting today it was AN IRAQI TAXI DRIVER. But not just any old Iraqi taxi driver—an Iraqi taxi driver BRITISH INTELLIGENCE OFFICIALS NEVER MET. Here's what happened:

1. MI6 was "squeezing their agents in Iraq for anything at all."

2. The Iraqi National Accord, an exile organization set up with money from the CIA, had hooked up MI6 with a senior Iraqi military officer. This officer claimed he spoke to the taxi driver, and said the taxi driver in turn claimed he'd heard this from OTHER Iraqi officers he'd driven somewhere. So this was completely uncorroborated, third-hand, with a taxi driver in the middle.

3. The Iraqi National Accord's spokesman later described the "45 minute" claim as a "crock of shit."

4. Breakfast time!

Murdoch, by the way, owns many newspapers, not just the Sun, as well as the Fox News Channel and websites such as BeliefNet.

Had enough yet? I certainly have.

Pictured: Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana.