GOP Rep. Mouthes Falsehoods About Dead And Missing American Soldiers On House Floor
October 17, 2007 -- 1:00 PM EST // //
One of the things that never ceases to astonish this blog is the sheer tenacity of winger mendaciousness. Once the right-wingers have injected a narrative or set of "facts" into the discourse, it doesn't matter how devastatingly the tale's been debunked. The sewage just keep on overflowing the sewers.
Case in point: Hapless GOP Rep. Todd Akin. A few moments ago, he went on the House floor and argued for the defeat of the House Dems' FISA legislation. His rationale? That tale the wingers have been flogging for days about the wiretaps of Iraqi insurgents that were supposedly delayed by surveillance laws, thus slowing an effort to find three U.S. troops who'd been kidnapped outside of Baghdad, all of whom are now dead or missing.
This story has been thoroughly debunked -- but that didn't stop Akin from going right up there on the House floor and reciting it with perfect sincerity, not to mention a healthy dollop of regard for his own imagined oratorical powers.
You knew this was coming, of course. A couple of days ago, Roll Call reported that GOPers were planning on using this tale to "put a human face" on the FISA debate. Winger media outlets dutifully pushed the story, and winger bloggers cued up the canned outrage.
But as was quickly discovered, it just isn't true. As TPM's own Spencer Ackerman and The Washington Post both demonstrated, the delay was actually caused largely by legal wrangling between agencies and the inability of Justice Department officials to find Alberto Gonzales to authorize the wiretap, along with multiple other reasons which don't relate to the FISA debate.
No matter, however. Watch Akin recite this tale:
He said:
I rise to call attention to a tragedy of our own making.The bodies of "one or two" have been found -- such attention to detail for someone who cares so much about the troops!In May of this year, a U.S. soldier, Alex Jimenez, along with several of his friends, were captured by al Qaeda. As our intelligence officers wanted to tap into wires to try to find his whereabouts, they were hobbled and had to wait ten hours for lawyers to get through the FISA court, to allow them to get the critical information they needed. That information lost, this soldier and his compatriots have never been found, although the bodies of one or two have been found.
Also priceless is that opening line: "I rise to call attention to a tragedy of our own making." Really, not even Charles Dickens could do justice to this sort of pomposity and windbaggery, never mind the sheer mendacity of this whole act.
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