A Churning Urn of Burning Junk

Melissa on Mort:

Apparently Mort didn't manage to rescue his spittle-flecked essay, Bush-hatred a threat to national security, from the jaws of the pooch determined to eat his homework, ... because it's a pile of dogshit.

Mort is Mort Kondracke; here's what he wrote in the Pasadena Star News today:

ENOUGH already! It's harmful enough that ideological conflict and partisan politics are preventing this country from solving its long-term challenges on health care, fiscal policy and energy. Now it's threatening our national survival.

I do not exaggerate. Bush-hatred has reached such intensity that CIA officers and other bureaucrats are leaking major secrets about anti-terrorism policy and communications intelligence that undermine our ability to fight Islamic extremism.

Would newspapers in the midst of World War II have printed the fact that the United States had broken German and Japanese codes, enabling the enemy to secure its communications? Or revealed how and where Nazi spies were being interrogated? Nowadays, newspapers win Pulitzer Prizes for such disclosures. In Congress and in much of the media, the immediate reaction to news that the National Security Agency was intercepting international terrorist communications was not to say, "Good work - and how can we help?" Rather, it was to scream about a "domestic spying" scandal, as though Richard Nixon were back in the White House and tapping the telephone of Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean.

Bill Quick at Daily Pundit answers the first question in the paragraph above:

Yes, moron, they would, and did:

On June 4, 1942, acting on information from a newly decrypted Japanese naval code, the Americans attacked and destroyed four Japanese aircraft carriers in a victory that virtually ended Japan's ability to carry on an aggressive war in the Pacific. But three days later McCormick's Tribune ran a story with the headline "NAVY HAD WORD OF JAP PLAN TO STRIKE AT SEA" and that should have been the end of Magic right there. But inexplicably the Japanese ignored this heaven-sent gift, and went on sending military and diplomatic messages in codes the Americans could read.

It always amazes me how ignorant of so many things -- especially science, economics, and history -- so many top-level journalists actually are. And yet they expect us to take their chin-pulling bullshit seriously.