Coke Can of Mass Destruction


I guess I forgot about this story this morning...and it looks like everyone else has too, in light of the release of the Larry Craig interrogation...but earlier today CNN's main page featured the breathless red banner announcing the ultimate wingnut fantasy...the equivalent of Larry Craig stumbling upon the largest public restroom in the country, with nary a cop for miles...yes, it was, at last, and better than any Christmas they dare did dream...the...weapons...of...mass...destruction. After all, CNN said so, in big white letters surrounded by banner red, the universal signal of doom, dread...the kind of thing that has a permanently basement bound 'nut, at long last, twitching, tingling, and wiping Cheeto dusted fingers on unwashed pant legs.

Too bad it all turned out to be so much pixil dust:

U.N. weapons inspectors discovered a potentially hazardous chemical warfare agent that was taken from an Iraqi chemical weapons facility 11 years ago and mistakenly stored in their offices in the heart of midtown Manhattan all that time, officials said Thursday.

The material, identified in inventory files as phosgene — a chemical substance used in World War I weapons — was discovered Aug. 24. It was only identified on Wednesday because it was marked simply with an inventory number, and officials had to check the many records in their vast archives, said Ewen Buchanan, a spokesman for the U.N. inspection agency...

Buchanan said the phosgene was in liquid form, suspended in oil, in a soda-can-sized container that was sealed in a plastic bag.

Records indicated the material was from a 1996 excavation of the bombed-out research and development building at Iraq's main chemical weapons facility at Muthana, near Samarra. The entire facility was extensively bombed during the 1991 Gulf War, Buchanan said.

So, when all is said and done, with at least tens of thousands of lives lost, hundreds of thousands more shattered, millions displaced, the casus belli ultima is...a Coke Can's worth of phosgene, already in custody.

Nonetheless, this is instructive, at least in terms of the supposed "librul" CNN: for a good bit of this morning, they proved themselves embarrassingly ready as ever to sing the chorus line for Wingnut Fantasia, much as David Gregory perhaps a little TOO eagerly acceded to the role of Pip for Karl Rove's Gladys Knight. Your librul media, ladies and gentlemen.

But note that professional loons like Brent Bozell STILL claim "librul bias", using ever more absurd arguments, which, come to think of it, mirror the ever more absurd arguments made by "family values" politicians like Bob Allen or Larry Craig...or the ever more absurd arguments made by Team Bush in pushing the Surge.

Is there a limity to lunacy? Well, let's hope so...