Today I got an email blast from World Nut Daily trying to sell some of the books they publish. One of the books is by famed birther book author Jerome Corsi. It is entitled Atomic Iran, and it details how Iran is on the verge of creating an atomic bomb because of the misdeeds of the Clinton Administration. This book boldly predicts that Iran would have a bomb within five years.
Pretty scary, eh? That means that we need to work hard to keep Iran from getting an atomic bomb, maybe even to the point of launching bombing raids on Iran to keep them from building a bomb. There's only one problem with that bold prediction and prescription for action: This book was published in 2006. Today is 2012. Which is, erm... *six* years after Jerome Corsi made that prediction. Oops! Yet Crazy Joe Farah of WND.com actually *included* the publication date in his email blast, even though the publication date *proves* that Corsi is either an idiot, a moron, or a liar!
Fail.
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Tuxy, some of the Clinton era emails, the ones your conservative uncle says got forwarded to him and he's so mad, are still being recycled today with Obama's name inserted and the body of the text unchanged.
ReplyDeleteIt's all part of creating an Alternate set of facts an Alterante Reality for conservatives to reference when they point out Obama wasn't vetted, Obama's a "secret muslin"...
Corsi might be wrong on the date -- and his argument may be full of what one scoops out of a litter box -- but it does look like Iran is progressing toward nuclear weapon capability. This is not a good thing, but it is probably not the end of the world as we know it, either. I was reading a pretty well-reasoned article the other day that suggested Iran wants the bomb as a deterrent; the mullahs that run the place aren't stupid, even if their puppet president is, and would be reluctant to launch a nuclear war against Israel which would wipe out so many Palestinian and Lebanese Muslims as collateral damage. It would totally destroy their influence in the Arab world, which is where they really want to exercise it.
ReplyDeleteFacts? Proof? You assume that conservatives do not consider facts as just liberal talking points.
ReplyDeleteKaren, every nation on the planet which has native uranium reserves is five years from building an atomic weapon. Remember, we *know* how long it takes to build a bomb and what kind of technology it takes to do it: it takes 1940's technology, and it takes five years (1939-1944). The science to build these things is similarly public domain, taught in every university for the past sixty years, including Iranian universities (duh!). Take a big pile of U-238, form it into rods, use heavy water or graphite to moderate it, extract out the Pu-239 chemically (no centrifuges necessary), build an implosion sphere (guns are too iffy because Pu-239 fissions more readily than U-235), boom.
ReplyDeleteBut remember: All of Iran's oil goes out through the Strait of Hormuz, because their oil fields are right across the border from Iraq's oil fields. And the gerontocrats who actually run Iran know that the moment they test a bomb, they're in the situation of North Korea -- an embargoed pariah state, and because all their oil goes out by ship, an embargo that can be *enforced*. They're old, they're comfortable, and they want to stay that way, which is incompatible with being an embargoed pariah state. If they feared being invaded they'd likely go full steam ahead and build a bomb, but who's going to invade Iran? Not the United States, we just finished extricating ourselves from Iraq (sneaking out in the middle of the night, even!) and are desperately trying to extricate ourselves from the clusterfuck that is Afghanistan. Israel? Israel couldn't even handle tiny Lebanon. Pakistan? Not happening, India would take advantage of that to solve their long-standing border issue. Besides, the reality is that Iran *already* has their own "atom bomb" -- the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz at will. Which they don't do now because it would cut off their own oil too, but if we invaded, the first thing we'd occupy would be their oil fields (right there on the border with Iraq remember?), at which point, DOH!
So no, the Iranians aren't working on a bomb, because if they wanted one, they would have had it by December 2008 (five years after the U.S. invaded Iraq, easily defeated Saddam's military, and caused the ayatollahs to briefly shit their collective britches for the next six months in fear the troops were going to turn eastward and head into Iran until it became clear we were like the dog that caught a car -- okay, he caught it, what's he gonna do with it?!). In short, Corsi's book was bullshit when he published it, and it's still bullshit, as is that article that purports that Iran's ayatollahs want a nuclear weapon. Because Iran *does* have native uranium deposits. Just sayin'.
- Badtux the Science Penguin