Sen. McCarthy back in Congress

Michigan Republican Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee - let me repeat that - chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is not even waving around a blank piece of paper, ala Sen. Joe McCarthy, "listing" al Qaeda infiltrators in the U.S. intelligence community. This is the same Peter Hoekstra, (did I mention he's not some backbencher nut but the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee?) who just a couple of weeks ago waived a real piece of paper around and claimed that the weapons of mass destruction had in fact been found in Iraq. Hoekstra explained why the White House wasn't bragging about the find saying that the president was being forward-looking and concentrating on the development of a secure government in Iraq. Only one problem with Hoekstra and his sidekick Sen. Rick Santorum's claim - it's false. Even the Bush administration's own Defense Department said, "This does not reflect a capacity that was built up after 1991," and that the munitions "are not the WMDs this country and the rest of the world believed Iraq had, and not the WMDs for which this country went to war." But why let facts and reason get in the way of a good lie?

Now Hoekstra is back with his claim that recent leaks (whistleblowing) of classified intelligence programs (of illegal and unconstitutional activities) are deliberate attempts to help al Qaeda. This time, not constrained with even waving a real piece of fraudulent paper around as a prop, Hoekstra says, "I don't have any evidence. But from my perspective, when you have information that is leaked that is clearly helpful to our enemy, you cannot discount that possibility (that al Qaeda or al Qaeda allies have infiltrated the U.S. intelligence community." I like that basis for the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee to give press conferences - "I don't have any evidence...". I don't have any evidence that Hoekstra, who is actually in charge of something, and not something silly like national pretzel day, but of the Intelligence Committee, is in fact a moron but I cannot discount the possibility. I'd say we have hit bottom but these guys are so good at surpassing my expectation that they can't get any lower that I won't. We have gone from fabricated evidence to no evidence. Before you needed to at least have some drunk foreign source that you never interviewed and were warned he was unreliable, like the infamous Curveball, for you to send the nation to war. Now we are going to base critical government policy based no evidence. Just a belief from a guy in charge of the House Intelligence Committee.

Maybe instead of the Intelligence Committee investigating whether al Qaeda leaked classified information to the New York Times, they should investigate whether the chairman has any intelligence at all.