Ann Coulter: Idiot of the Year
I tried. I tried real hard at the beginning of the year to ignore the pantomime’s of Ann Coulter. After getting her jaw wired shut, I figured Ann might cool it for a bit. Nope. Another email with her name on it landed on my inbox. I tried to ignore it but skimmed over it and read this from the summary of her latest blog post entitled Teaching Democrats New Tricks:
Ravens can learn to snatch fishermen’s untended lines to get fish. Worms learn not to eat harmful bacteria (as opposed to the tasty nutritious bacteria they normally feed on). Fruit fly larvae can learn to detect the scent of predators.
But liberals cannot learn that the Aug. 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.” had not a speck of what we call “useful information.”
Seriously? No “useful information”? Then why the hell do they even bother writing these briefings? What’s the point of them if they don’t actually contain anything “useful”? Off I go to read the original declassified briefing and find out.
The problem I found with the briefing isn’t that it didn’t contain anything useful as it relates to 9/11. No, the problem is that the most useful information is right at the end, some of which is on the second page:
We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [classified] service in 1998 saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of “Blind Shaykh” ‘Umar ‘Abd al-Rahman and other US-held extremists.
Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.
Nope. Not useful whatsoever…or is it? That last paragraph seems to make it pretty clear that there was “patterns of suspicious activity” to suggest that a hijacking would indeed occur, right?
Or maybe the problem isn’t that the intelligence isn’t useful but rather that the briefing itself is poorly designed. What if Bush had received a briefing that looked something like this?
With a threat level indicator and more emphasis on the most important parts of the briefing, do you think maybe President Bush would have taken it a bit more seriously? Yes, design can make that much of a difference…even for someone like President Bush.
So after reviewing this little gem of a blog post, I went back to read a few other prior ones I ignored. As expected, I was greeted with a massive barrage of bullshit thrown in all directions.
Terrorists’ Restless Leg Syndrome
This is another one I read and thought, “You’re kidding, right?” Nope…she’s not:
I thought the rest of the world was going to love us if we elected B. Hussein Obama! Somebody better tell the Indian Muslims. As everyone but President-elect B. Hussein Obama’s base knows, many of the Guantanamo detainees cannot be sent to their home countries, cannot be released and cannot be tried. They need to be held in some form of extra-legal limbo the rest of their lives, sort of like Phil Spector.
And now they’re Obama’s problem.
This is the only part she gets half-ass right. Yes, there are detainees that are basically in legal limbo right now. However, she’s dead wrong in thinking that somehow everyone in Obama’s base doesn’t know this. I know it. Many others know it. Obama knows it. He basically wants to shut Guantanamo down. And why? Simple. Because it’s effectively been running outside of the law.
Detainees are getting a half-ass degree of constitutional rights given to them. That’s not right. Regardless of whether we think they are guilty or not, every detainee deserves to be tried with the perception that they are innocent until proven guilty. If you can’t prove it then let them go. Regardless of whether a detainee is a proven terrorist or not, if you can’t prove it then you don’t have any right to hold them. Our government has no right to think that they are somehow outside of the law, that international laws and the Constitution do not apply to them or to certain people.
There’s a right way and a wrong way when it comes to gathering intelligence and dealing with suspected terrorists. If our government does it the right way then we’ll stand a chance and maintaining good intelligence and promoting better relations with other countries. If they continue to do it the wrong way though then we’ll continue to see the same level of bad relations with other countries and will only promote more terrorism and more bad intelligence in the long run. It’s bullshit to say the least.
After being captured fighting with Taliban forces against Americans in 2001, Abdullah Massoud was sent to Guantanamo, where the one-legged terrorist was fitted with a special prosthetic leg, at a cost of $50,000-$75,000 to the U.S. taxpayer. Under the Americans With Disabilities Act, Massoud would now be able to park his car bomb in a handicapped parking space!
Rather than talk about the real issue here, Ann would rather spend her entire blog post talking about what could very well be a figment of her imagination. I searched and searched for confirmed sources about Abdullah Massoud and his $75,000 artificial leg and did find squat. Virtually all reports I found point back to (you guessed it!) Ann’s blog post! Forget about the confirmed reports of torture and complete disregard for the law. No, Ann, you’d rather ignore all of that and talk about a damn artificial leg! Ugg!
Wanna know what the real problem is? The Bush administration has never been able to define the detainees at Guantanamo as POW’s and follow the laws of the Geneva conventions. That’s the problem. The Bush administration from the very beginning deemed the “War on Terror” as an un-conventional war and thus figured that the detainees at Guantanamo were not subject to the same laws as POW’s. Nor is the prison at Guantanamo Bay considered a province of the U.S. so detainees are not subject to the laws of our Constitution. Oh, and the evidence on them can’t be talked about in open court rooms because the evidence may be too “sensitive”. So exactly what rights do these people have?
And someone like Ann talks about tax dollars spent on an artificial limb? There isn’t any real hardcore information on that nor is that even the problem. The real problem has everything to do with how truly screwed up the Guantanamo situation really is and who caused it to get that way. Why didn’t Ann address that rather than spending 90% of her post talking about a terrorist with an artificial limb. That’s just crazy!
Now, you could argue that similar circumstances happened in WWII, however, what happened in WWII was much different. There are some similarities though. There were legal German-American and Japanese-American people and families sent to camps and held against their will simply because they were German or Japanese. Not everything was perfect even during WWII.
Sarah Palin: Conservative of the Year
Sarah Palin wins HUMAN EVENTS’ prestigious “Conservative of the Year” Award for 2008 for her genius at annoying all the right people. The last woman to get liberals this hot under the collar would have been … let’s see now … oh, yeah: Me!
Oh, Jesus, is she seriously this screwed up?
So Palin had one more child — and a lot more executive experience — than the guy at the top of the Democrats’ ticket. (I suspect what liberals were really mad about was that if Palin became Vice President, she probably would have hired a nanny who was a U.S. citizen.)
Yep, she is! The nanny thing alone is enough to make me scream. The rest of her post just made me want to hit a baby (if you’re a Dane Cook fan, you’ll get it).
I’ll be brief with this cause I really don’t have the energy to rant about this one. Makes my brain hurt.
Anyone who really knows me knows that I am the least prejudice, least racist person you’ll ever meet. There are only two things I cannot stand and will not put up with: ignorance and stupidity.
The problem with Sarah Palin wasn’t because she was a mom or that she didn’t have the experience to be Vice President (she really wasn’t that experienced…but that’s beside the point). The problem was that Sarah Palin was just too damn dumb to hold the second highest office in the land. Time after time after time through the election she stumbled and fell on her words with a complete lack of any common sense or a degree of knowledge on things that are too damn important for her not to know. By comparison to Obama, she’s practically a Kindergartner in politics. McCain would have probably lost the election anyways but he really lost the election with Palin on his ticket.
Ann Coulter: Idiot of the Year
Like Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter is too dumb to be taken seriously. Rarely does she exercise any common sense or degree of knowledge with her punditry. It’s hard to take her seriously at all. Her words spread like a virus with no cure in sight. How can anyone have such a one-sided argument without facing the facts? Doesn’t make any sense to me.
What Ann fails to realize is that there are three sides to any story: your side, their side, and the truth. To ignore the truth or just absorb the parts of the truth that you like is highly ignorant and stupid.
It is for this reason that I award the first ever Steamd.net Idiot of the Year award to Ann Coulter! Congratulations Ann!
Tags: coulter, guantanamo, palin
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