Contributors
Stefan Sharkansky- Contributor
Commentator, Premier Blogger, and Software Consultant. A former San Francisican now relocated to Seattle. Mr. Sharkansky keeps a watchful eye on Robert Scheer and Nancy Pelosi. He has created a very useful tool for dissecting Robert (former Black Panther and apologist for North Korea and Cuba) Scheer – it’s called the Canard-o-Matic and is very useful in understanding the dark mind of this Los Angeles Times communist columnist.

Who Lied?
Bob uses slieght of hand for a cover up of his own...
[Stefan Sharkansky] 0905/03

It would be fascinating, I think, to observe a day in the life of our favorite Canardmeister, Robert "Three-Home" Scheer. In the meantime, I have to make do with my mental image of him -- waking up at the crack of noon, groaning and scratching himself as he fumbles his way out of bed. Still in his underwear, he opens the front door to look for the newspaper and has to walk all the way out to sidewalk to get it because that's where the never-been-tipped paperboy tosses it now. Peering at the newsprint through the smudged lenses of his spectacles, Scheer makes out only the words "Bush", "Iraq" and "mislead". "Aha!", he says to himself, "I knew Bush was lying", and then he sets his Canard-o-matic to "800 words", presses the PRINT button and crawls back into bed for his afternoon nap.

I can't think of any other explanation for Scheer's latest column: Bush Was All Too Willing To Use Emigrés' Lies, which cites a Los Angeles Times story that the case for war with Iraq was largely based on lies:

Bush is such a master at deceiving the American public that even now he is not threatened with the prospect of impeachment or any serious congressional investigation into the possibility that he led this nation into war with lies.

Yes, Bob, but whose lies were they? Robert Scheer artfully omits an important piece of context that was in the Times article:

officials say former Iraqi operatives have confirmed since the war that Hussein's regime sent "double agents" disguised as defectors to the West to plant fabricated intelligence. In other cases, Baghdad apparently tricked legitimate defectors into funneling phony tips about weapons production and storage sites.

"They were shown bits of information and led to believe there was an active weapons program, only to be turned loose to make their way to Western intelligence sources,"
...
Hussein's motives for such a deliberate disinformation scheme may have been to bluff his enemies abroad, from Washington to Tehran, by sending false signals of his military might. Experts also say the dictator's defiance of the West, and its fear of his purported weapons of mass destruction, boosted his prestige at home and was a critical part of his power base in the Arab world.

Hussein also may have gambled that the failure of United Nations weapons inspectors to find specific evidence identified by bogus defectors ultimately would force the Security Council to lift sanctions imposed after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. U.S. officials now believe Hussein hoped to then covertly reconstitute his weapons programs.

Ah. So it wasn't Bush who lied, but a miscalculating Saddam who lied. You wouldn't know that if you relied on Scheer's interpretation of the LA Times story. Then again, there are a lot of things you wouldn't know if you rely on Robert Scheer to explain the world to you.

Finally, Robert Scheer shows off his knowledge of all things piscatorial:

American soldiers standing guard over the White House's imperial ambitions — a new Middle East as linchpin to a new world order — are now being shot like fish in a barrel.

Skipping past the silly Leninist trope about "imperialism", are our soldiers being "shot like fish in a barrel"?

According to the Scripps Howard News Service, out of the 140,000 troops in Iraq, 70 have been killed in combat since the President declared an end to "major combat operations" on May 1. Those are 70 American soldiers I wish were still alive, but they represented 1 in 2,000. If you're shooting into a barrel of 2,000 fish and only manage to hit 1 of them, either you are not a very good shot, or the fish are doing a reasonable job of protecting themselves.

[copyright 2003 Stefan Sharkansky]