Fun With the News

This is fun... You probably read the news in the last couple of days that we had, on Monday, killed an al Qaeda chemical weapons expert along the Pakistan / Afghanistan border. Fairly routine, we hear these sorts of stories occasionally. However, if you dig down, the man is named, one Midhat Mursi al Sayid Umar, also known as Abu Khabab al Masri.

One little problem, according to the White House, we'd killed him in January 2006. Which apparently means that al Qaeda has perfected resurrection technology. That's pretty scary!

Also, in the "They'll just say anything, won't they" category, the Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman on Fox News was asked this question: Has technology improved so dramatically that [off-shore] drilling can now be done in a way that protects the environment?

He answered: I believe that it can. When we had Katrina and Rita, the two worst hurricanes in — at least in recent memory, in ‘05, some three years ago, there was not one case where we had a situation with oil or gas being spilled in the environment.

Um... Lying? Or inept at his job? Because according to various sources including the U.S. Minerals Management Service, over a hundred platforms were totally destroyed and there were 124 offshore spills for a total of over 740,000 gallons directly caused by one or the other of the two hurricanes.

So right now, they're pushing the idea that offshore drilling is the only answer to our national addiction to oil (an absurdity I've dealt with before), and in order to make us all think it's safe, they're blatently lying about the risks. They really do think we're that stupid.

(Thanks to Countdown with Keith Olbermann for alerting me to both stories).