history of Feith's stupidity

Lefty blog First Draft presents a series of historical posts on the idiocy/criminal maliciousness that is Doug Feith, with the purpose of reminding people that waaaaay back in 2003 people were already trying to call bullshit on his intelligence cooking. Not that anyone really noticed.

Has a link to a book Special Plans: The Blogs on Douglas Feith & the Faulty Intelligence That Led to War, which collects blog posts on the matter. Also includes:

People like ABW, who put together an exhaustive timeline of all Feith's missteps and mistakes in a Kos diary, such that you can go all the way back to 1996 to see how this mess got started.

People like Matt Yglesias, who put the blame where it really belonged, on the Congress that did absolutely zero oversight of anything Feith and his cronies were doing.

People like Jack K at The Grumpy Forrester who brought home why what Feith did isn't just some silly insider Washington issue.

And the post finishes with the funny line: "the history's worth knowing so the present mound of bullshit makes sense."

Pentagon-paid propaganda

More secret plans revealed (Wired)... A study written for US Special Operations Command suggested:

“Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering,” write the report’s co-authors, James Kinniburgh and Dororthy Denning…. Denning, a professor at Naval Postgraduate School, adds in an e-mail, “I got some positive feedback from people who read the article, but I don’t know if it led to anything.”

Now, there's no evidence they ever actually followed through on this. And there are plenty of crazy wingers ready to attack anyone they're pointed at without being paid. But on the other hand, given the hiring of journalists and columnists by the administration, and the Pentagon's own interests in the media war, it wouldn't be surprising if they had.

See also: C&L,

on group bogs

Interesting post about the power and possibilities of group blogs. Good to save for reference in z-blog project.

sad state of discourse

Orcinus complains that a new Carnegie Mellon study ranking blogs lists so many conservative ones as the 'must-read' top 100 of the blogosphere. The #2-ranked blog (which I had NEVER heard of! - guess I'm an out-of-touch moonbat), Don Surber, contained stunningly ignorant discussion of hate crimes laws.

Gives Dave an excuse to collect many of his posts on hate crimes. So follow the link above for useful summary discussion.