Stupidity Is The New ‘Genius’ In The Progressive Cult of Obama

The Left considers itself smarter than the rest of us, manufacturing the consensus of their own intelligence and insist that it proves them right, when they are horrifyingly wrong.

One of Daniel Greenfield’s best essays yet written that deconstructs the MarxoFascist/liberal/progressive Leftists in our midst, and explains why they are such smug-smarmy and arrogant people who think themselves morally superior to the rest of the America they hate.

The Left Is Too Smart To Fail

Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog

The infrastructure of manufactured intelligence has become a truly impressive thing. Today as never before there is an industry dedicated, not to educating people, but to making them feel smart. From paradigm shifting TED talks to paradigm to books by thought leaders and documentaries by change agents that transform your view of the world, manufactured intelligence has become its own culture.

Manufactured intelligence is the smarmy quality that oozes out of a New York Times column by Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd, Frank Bruni and the rest of the gang who tell you nothing meaningful while dazzling you with references to international locations, political events and pop culture, tying together absurdities into one synergistic web of nonsense that feels meaningful.

There’s a reason that there’s a Tom Friedman article generator online. But it could just as easily be a New York Times article generator that sums up the hollowness of the buzzword-fed crowd that is always hungry to reaffirm the illusion of its own intelligence.

We all know that George W. Bush was a moron. And we all know that Obama is a genius. We have been told by Valerie Jarrett, by his media lapdogs and even by the great man himself that he is just too smart to do his job. And it’s reasonable that a genius would be bored by the tedious tasks involved in running the most powerful nation on earth.

But what is “smart” anyway? What makes Obama a genius? It’s not his IQ. It’s probably not his grades or we would have seen them already. It’s that like so many of the thought leaders and TED talkers, he makes his supporters feel smart. The perception of intelligence is really a reflection.

Smart once used to be an unreachable quality. Einstein was proclaimed a genius, because it was said that no one understood his theories. Those were undemocratic times when it was assumed that the eggheads playing with the atom had to be a lot smarter than us or we were in big trouble.

Intelligence has since been democratized. Smart has been redistributed. Anyone can get an A for effort. And the impulse of manufactured intelligence is not smart people, but people who make us feel smart. That is why Neil deGrasse Tyson, another obsessively self-promoting mediocrity like Carl Sagan, is now the new face of science. Sagan made science-illiterate liberals feel smart while pandering to their biases. Tyson does the same thing for the Twitter generation.

Self-esteem is the new intelligence. Obama’s intelligence was manufactured by pandering to the biases and tastes of his supporters. The more he shared their biases and tastes, the smarter he seemed to be and the smarter they felt by having so much in common with such a smart man.

Obama Inc. built his image around the accessories of modern manufactured intelligence, premature biographies, global reference points and pop culture. This marriage of high and low with an exotic spice from the east embodies modern liberal intelligence. Take a dash of pop culture, mix it with an important quote, throw in some recent technological development that promises to “change how we all live”, mention your time in a foreign culture and draw an insipid conclusion.

That’s not just the DNA of every other New York Times column, TED talk and important book by an equally important thought leader sitting under the floodlights at your local struggling chain bookstore with its portraits of great writers on the wall and the tables groaning under unsold copies of Fifty Shades of Grey, Malcolm Gladwell, Candace Bushnell and Khaled Hosseini.

It’s also the DNA of Obama Inc. It is its assumption of intelligence through compassionate self-involvement, progressive insights derived from an obsession with the self and the sanctification of Third World references, real or imaginary, invoking the spiritual power of the Other, the totem of alien magic, to transcend the rational and the pragmatic. It is upscale Oprah; egotism masquerading as enlightenment, condescension as compassion and soothing quotes as religion.

Once upon a time, bright young American men went to Europe and wrote books about the world. That was our notion of intelligence. JFK did it and was widely praised for his intelligence. Today bright young American men and women go to the Third World and write their books about the world, mining the compost of their Flickr accounts, Tumblr updates and Twitter feed for deep thoughts.

Intelligence to a modern liberal isn’t depth, it’s appearance. It isn’t even an intellectual quality, but a spiritual quality. Compassionate people who care about others are always “smarter”, no matter how stupid they might be, because they care about the world around them.

An insight into how we live matters more than useful knowledge. Skill is irrelevant unless it’s a transformative progressive “changing the way we live” application.

Obama and his audience mistake their orgy of mutual flattery for intelligence and depth. Like a trendy restaurant whose patrons know that they have good taste because they patronize it, his supporters know that they are smart because they support a smart man and Obama knows he is smart because so many smart people support him.

The thought never rises within this bubble of manufactured intelligence that all of them might really be idiots who have convinced themselves that they are geniuses because they read the right books (or pretend to read them), watch the right movies and shows (or pretend to) and have the right values (or pretend to).

Smart is surplus when you have Gladwell sitting under a full DVD set of The Wire prominently displayed on your bookshelf right alongside a signed copy of The Audacity of Hope.

Marxists thought that Marxism was smart. Progressives measure intelligence in progressivism. Its only two qualities are “world awareness” and “progressive future adaptation”.

Obama hit both these qualities perfectly with his Third Culture background and the appearance of modern technocratic polish. Not just a politician, but a thought leader, he had the pseudo-celebrity quality of their kind, able to move smoothly from a celebrity panel about Third World microfinance, to a Jay-Z concert to a fundraiser for DIY solar panels for India to a banquet for a political hack.

Everyone who encountered him thought that he was smart because he made them feel smart. And that is the supreme duty of the modern liberal intellectual, not to be smart, but to make others feel smart. Genuine intelligence is threatening. Manufactured intelligence is soothing. And those intellectually superior progressives who need to believe that Obama is smart in order to believe that they are smart cannot stop believing in his brains without confronting the illusion of their own intelligence.

Manufactured intelligence isn’t smart. It’s stupid. It’s as stupid as building windmills for sustainable energy in places where the wind hardly blows, as stupid as calling inflated budgets “investments” and as stupid as believing that a man is smart because he can reference poverty in the Third World.

It’s easy to tell apart fake intelligence from the real thing. Manufactured intelligence fakes “smart” by playing word games. It constantly invents new terms to provide the enlightened elites with a secret language of Newspeak buzzwords that mean less than the words they are replacing. The buzzwords, Thought Leader and Change Agent, quickly take on cultist overtones and become ways of describing how the group’s leaders would like to use power, than anything about the world that they describe.

Manufactured intelligence is a consensus, not a debate. It’s not arrived at through a process, but flopped into like a warm soothing bath of nothingness. It’s correct because everyone says so. And anyone who disagrees is clearly stupid and lacks awareness of the interconnected ways that the world synergistically works. And probably doesn’t know science, Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson either.

Real intelligence is the product of constant debate. It is forever striving to overthrow the consensus and willing to challenge anything and everything. It uses a specialized vocabulary only to describe specialized phenomena, rather than replacing existing words with new words to describing existing phenomena in order to seem as if it understands the future better by going all 1984 on it.

Finally, manufactured intelligence is self-involved. It mistakes feeling for thinking. It deals not with how things are or even how we would like them to be, but how we feel about the way things are and what our feelings about the way things are say about what kind of people we are.

Liberal intelligence is largely concerned with the latter. It is a self-esteem project for mediocre elites, the sons and daughters of the formerly accomplished who are constantly diving into the shallow pools of their own minds to explore how their privilege and entitlement makes them view the world and how they can be good people by challenging everyone’s paradigms and how they can think outside the box by climbing into it and pulling the flaps shut behind them.

Perpetual self-involvement isn’t intelligence regardless of how many of the linguistic tricks of memoir fiction it borrows to endow its liberal self-help section with the appearance of nobility.

Liberalism isn’t really about making the world a better place. It’s about reassuring the elites that they are good people for wanting to rule over it.

That is why Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize for having good intentions. His actual foreign policy mattered less than the appearance of a new transformative foreign policy based on speeches. Gore promised to be be harsher on Saddam than Bush, but no one remembers that because everyone in the bubble knows that the Iraq War was stupid… and only conservatives do stupid things.

Liberal intelligence exists on the illusion of its self-worth. The magical thinking that guides it in every other area from economics to diplomacy also convinces it that if it believes it is smart, that it will be. The impenetrable liberal consensus in every area is based on this delusion of intelligence. Every policy is right because it’s smart and it’s smart because it’s progressive and it’s progressive because smart progressives say that it is.

Progressives manufacture the consensus of their own intelligence and insist that it proves them right.

Imagine a million people walking in a circle and shouting, “WE’RE SMART AND WE’RE RIGHT. WE’RE RIGHT BECAUSE WE’RE SMART. WE’RE SMART BECAUSE WE’RE RIGHT.” Now imagine that these marching morons dominate academia, the government bureaucracy and the entertainment industry allowing them to spend billions yelling their idiot message until it outshouts everyone else while ignoring the disasters in their wake because they are too smart to fail.

 

France Says NIE Report Bogus; Has Evidence Iran Seeking Nukes

As America turns harder to the Left, we are beset with stupidity, foolishness, outrageous lies, scandals, and endless political folly to our own detriment.

We are become like the Melba toast European Socialists and strive to be more like them. Even today, presumptive Liberal Republican nominee John McCain has suggested that America “listen to the views and respect the collective will of our democratic allies”. I don’t know what could be more stupid. If we listened” to these “democratic allies” Mr. McDufus – we would NOT be in Iraq OR Afghanistan taking the war to the Jihadists. We would be cowering with one appeasement policy after another while we are turned into a Muslim state from within as it is in Europe.

America has obviously lost it’s gonads as well as it’s brains and McCain might as well be John Kerry, Clinton or Obama, because they all state the same imbecillic nonsense in once capacity or another.

Meanwhile, the country Americans love to denounce; France – has suddenly jumped into the realm of common sense that America has abandoned, in order to state what many of us already knew the day the bogus NIE report was released by the CIA last December.

The French newspaper “Le Monde” says that it has documentation that Iran is still seeking to possess nuclear weapons and that last December’s NIW report that stated that Iran abandoned that quest – is bogus, and that it was a politically motivated report that did not give a true picture of the present nuclear program of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Duh. Those of us in America with a brain left already figured that out the day the bogus report was released.

They say the documents detail discussions between top Iranian officials about their ongoing nuclear program.

The article is translated through Babelfish:

THE WORLD

At the time the Security Council of UNO recently adopted a third series of sanctions intended to force Iran to stop his nuclear program, (Le Monde) had access to documents attesting that Teheran continued a military nuclear program after 2003, as opposed to what a report/ratio of the national direction of the American information affirmed, published on December 3, 2007.

February 25, the assistant general manager of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Finn Olli Heinonen, had presented evidence of the existence of this Iranian nuclear military program. A letter addressed during 2004 Gholam Reza Aghazadeh, to vice-president of the Organization of the atomic energy of Iran (AEOI), by engineer Mahdi Khaniki, one of the principal interlocutors of the IAEA and former ambassador of Iran in Syria, confirms its charges.

This document draws up an inventory of fixtures of the relations between Teheran and the inspectors of the agency of Vienna. Mahdi Khaniki recalls in particular that the inspectors of the IAEA – who act under the direction of Mr. Heinonen – required to see the contracts relating to the acquisition of spare parts entering the development of the centrifugal machines. Assembled in “cascade”, these centrifugal machines make it possible to enrich uranium, possibly until obtaining a military quality.

“At a meeting which proceeded on January 31, 2004 in the presence of Dr. Rohani (Hassan Rohani, principal negotiator of the Iranian nuclear program until the end of 2005), this one decided that these contracts were to be prepared formedlies to the wishes of the AEOI, so that they are ready to be provided with the IAEA.” “It is necessary to note, adds it, that the representative of the ministry for defense and assistance to the mées rearforces indicated at this meeting that the contracts had been written for a presentation (with the IAEA).”

“But, Mahdi Khaniki continues, of the parts of these contracts, which I myself saw with the ministry for defense, were crossed out black lines and the quantities did not appear; it thus seems that these contracts will cause more questions than those which should (normally) be presented at Agency (IAEA).” And to conclude: “Naturally, I asked as a preliminary to engineer Mohamadi to prepare the number necessary of contracts (corrected) and I hope that it already did it.”

For the specialists in the Iranian file, this letter represents an obvious proof of the implication of the Iranian ministry for defense in the nuclear file. What consolidates the suspicions on the military character of this program, while attesting efforts of the Iranians to dissimulate nature of it.

According to sources’ close to a service of information, this mail lies within the scope of the “Project 13”, whose heading is “project for the disappearance of the threats”.

Given what Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric has been in the past, is “project for the disappearance of the threats” in reference to his call for the annihilation of Israel and the punishment of America? The intents of Iran are clearly made, and I’m amazed at the deliberate level of ignorance we wish to place on this problem as the shouts grow louder against any kind of military action against Iran.

This project would have vocation to mislead the inspectors of the IAEA. The Research center in physics (PHRC) of Lavizan Shian was thus renamed “AMAD”, and its “departments” became “projects”, in order to scramble the tracks. In the second time, probably in 2006, name “AMAD” was also removed. Since, it is more made mention only of the “Center” to indicate the management of the military nuclear program.

The American services of information collected, in mid-December 2006, a conversation between two not identified civils servant held with the ministry for defense in Teheran and making state of divergences between persons in charge for the AEOI and the ministry for defense. One of the two interlocutors refers to the “Center” and underlines: “the AEOI was occupied of its interests, and its policy was at 180 degrees of ours. Currently, as for the CTBTO (Organization of the treaty of complete prohibition of the nuclear tests), I think that the ministry of defense must have the last word, parce that they (leaders of the AEOI) know that with the end of the account we intend to lead tests.” The doubt remains on the nature of these “tests”, but this reference reinforces the suspicions.

The information made public by Olli Heinonen, in February, in Vienna, contradicts a part of the conclusions of the report of the American services in December 2007. To explain this inconsistency, certain French diplomats evoke a “major dysfunction” within the American administration.

Other sources advance that, during 2007, the American services of information, as well as the Pentagon, worried about the climate sabre-rattler which reigned then in Washington, and about the risk to see president George Bush opening a new military face against Iran. The purpose of the report/ratio of December would then have been to cross short to the temptation of the American executive to resort to the force.

In other words, the purpose of the NIE report that was celebrated by every Democrat and mainstream media source in America, was to short circuit and circumvent any attack and war plans that were on the boards at the White House and Pentagon to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat.

I would call that treason, but Americans no longer like that word, unless someone dares question Global Warming – then it’s treason. But to undermine the country in favor of those who are sworn to our destruction – is today called patriotism by those that have racist pastors asking for God to damn the country or claim they were shot at by snipers in Bosnia.

Even the Treason Rag of Record, the New York Times is finding that it has to tapdance backwards on their celebration fo the NIE report they so loudly cheered and toasted.

NY Times Backpedaling on Iran NIE

March 7, 2008 – by Craig Karpel

The other day a friend who’s a distinguished journalist emailed me, “How about the New York Times’ FURIOUS backpedaling on the National Intelligence Estimate? They could have done the same analysis when it was released!”

At the gathering of ambassadors and arms-control experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Vienna headquarters, newly obtained and declassified documents were revealed that are “not consistent with any application other than the development of a nuclear weapon.”

“France’s ambassador, François-Xavier Deniau,” the Times reported, “said questions raised by the Vienna meeting had opened a ‘new chapter’ in the West’s effort to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear arms.” The Times explained:

This confrontation is different from the long-running American-led campaign. Gone are the veiled threats of military action from the White House. The wind largely went out of that effort in December, when American intelligence officials surprised Western allies — and angered Bush administration hawks — with a report saying Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Ah, so this confrontation was different, because the French, with their savoir faire, their joi de vivre, their déja vu all over again, were at last convinced that Iran — which has a space program whose covert goal is to put into orbit satellites capable of dropping nuclear weapons on any city on earth, such as Paris — must be subjected to a higher level of inaction, such as the toothless additional sanctions the Security Council authorized this week.

…But the NIE says Iran put an end to its secret nuclear weapons program, no?

Well, no.

Virtually all commentators have either misunderstood or misrepresented the NIE’s “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.”

The NIE goes on to say, “We assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.”

So “Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program” doesn’t mean “Tehran ended its nuclear weapons program.” It means the program was suspended.

It inconceivable to me that the word “halted” wasn’t deliberately chosen as an alternative — misleading because of its ambiguity — to the unmistakably clear word that should have been used. The intelligence official(s) who signed off on using “halted” instead of “suspended” in that life-and-death sentence should be found and fired.

Moderate confidence — I wish I had that much confidence in our intelligence agencies.

….The Times has found itself in a position where it needs to account for having neglected to report last December that — as to the intelligence community’s assessment of when our most virulent and implacable enemy will be able to make nuclear weapons — between the 2005 NIE and the 2007 NIE “basically nothing had changed.” Is the paper of record now pleading myopia?

It will probably utilize the Hillary Clinton Method: “Those are what our memories of it are” defense and say they ‘mis-spoke’.

Or…they can employ the Obama Defense and simply deny their assertions were ever made to the contrary, and then throw their reporters under the bus to join Obama’s grandmother.

But actions speak louder than words, and France is acting on the belief that Iran is on the verge of nuclear weapons that it will use on it’s enemies. This has resulted in Tehran getting angry and issuing a warning to French President Sarkozy.

I think that speaks to the truth of Iran’s ready-to-premiere nuclear weapons ability.

NIE Report: Sabotage By Bureaucrats Hellbent On Revenge

One never has to wait too long for the truth to come to light, as we discover that the much heralded NIE Report on Iran’s nuclear weapons program was authored by political hacks (one who has a stated grudge against President Bush) who suddenly reversed what they said in 2005. The report announces a determination 4 years after the fact of Iran’s “supposed” halt of it’s program in the hidden bunkers of Tehran, waving aside their report from just two years ago that stated with urgency the exact opposite of what the NIE is saying now.

It once again goes to prove that the initial reaction many of us who are paying attention to Ahmadinejad’s statements, objectives and aspirations of this NIE report, were correct in our suspicions. The NIE report may be the biggest act of foreign policy sabotage in our history.

One only hopes this report will not be the fatal catalyst in the coming annihilation Ahmadinejad has repeatedly said Iran will initiate in order to bring about a global Caliphate and the return of his 12th Imam.

Politics in America however is a powerful drug – where the aspirations of power and control trump national security for appeasement’s sake, and it is no secret that the Intelligence Apparatus in Washington is waging their own ideological war. They failed us in thwarting 9-11 – and it looks like they will again fail us with whatever nuclear holocaust will spring upon us by Jihadists and their proxies.

UPDATE – Added this new info about one of the NIE report’s main authors:

NIE – An abrupt about face since July of 2007

Consider that on July 11, 2007, roughly four or so months prior to the most recent NIE’s publication, Deputy Director of Analysis Thomas Fingar gave the following testimony before the House Armed Services Committee:

Iran and North Korea are the states of most concern to us. The United States’ concerns about Iran are shared by many nations, including many of Iran’s neighbors. Iran is continuing to pursue uranium enrichment and has shown more interest in protracting negotiations and working to delay and diminish the impact of UNSC sanctions than in reaching an acceptable diplomatic solution. We assess that Tehran is determined to develop nuclear weapons–despite its international obligations and international pressure. This is a grave concern to the other countries in the region whose security would be threatened should Iran acquire nuclear weapons.

This paragraph appeared under the subheading: “Iran Assessed As Determined to Develop Nuclear Weapons.” And the entirety of Fingar’s 22-page testimony was labeled “Information as of July 11, 2007.” No part of it is consistent with the latest NIE, in which our spooks tell us Iran suspended its covert nuclear weapons program in 2003 “primarily in response to international pressure” and they “do not know whether (Iran) currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.”

The inconsistencies are more troubling when we realize that, according to the Wall Street Journal, Thomas Fingar is one of the three officials who were responsible for crafting the latest NIE. The Journal cites “an intelligence source” as describing Fingar and his two colleagues as “hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials.” (The New York Sun drew attention to one of Fingar’s colleagues yesterday.)

So, if it is true that Dr. Fingar played a leading role in crafting this latest NIE, then we are left with serious questions:

Why did your opinion change so drastically in just four months time?
Is the new intelligence or analysis really that good? Is it good enough to overturn your previous assessments? Or, has it never really been good enough to make a definitive assessment at all?
Did your political or ideological leanings, or your policy preferences, or those of your colleagues, influence your opinion in any way?

Of course no one in the mainstream media will ask these questions, nor will the bulk of Americans even care to consider these questions. They hear the smooth and easy words they want to hear: Bush is bad, Iran is no threat.

This is the mantra of the Left and the Anti-war brigades – so it should not be surprising that political ideologues in our intelligence community are also playing politics with this football – unfortunately they grant our Jihadist enemies with grand schemes of global domination the victory – which Ahmadinejad has declared today.

Iran declares victory after U.S. nuclear report

“Today, the Iranian nation is victorious but you (the United States) are empty-handed,” Ahmadinejad said in a televised speech to a rally in the western Iranian city of Ilam.

I’d call it treason – but no one else will.

The NIE Report Authored By Political Hacks With An Agenda

The Wall Street Journal editorial that ran this morning echoes and expands upon suspicions first articulated by the New York Sun that the National Intelligence Estimate was cooked up by bureaucrats eager to embarrass George Bush and transform US policy towards Iran.

A dynamic is at work that will serve Iranian interests by throwing a wrench in plans to expand sanctions against it for its nuclear program; it also will serve to veto any plans to attack its nuclear facilities.

The three main authors of this report are former State Department officials with previous reputations that should lead one to doubt their conclusions. All three are ex-bureaucrats who, as is generally true of State Department types, favor endless rounds of negotiation and “diplomacy” and oppose confrontation. These three officials, according to the Wall Street Journal, have “reputations as hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials”.
They are Tom Fingar, formerly of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research; Vann Van Diepen, the National Intelligence Officer for WMD; and Kenneth Brill, the former U.S. Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
Tom Fingar was a State Department employee who was an expert on China and Germany — he has no notable experience, according to his bio in the Middle East and its geopolitics.
Vann http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2007/12/the_suspect_provenance_of_the.html is also a career State Department bureaucrat who, according to the New York Sun, is one of the State Department bureaucrats who want “revenge” for having their views regarding Iran ignored by the Bush Administration. He is now seeking to further his own agenda. As the Sun wrote in their editorial yesterday:
Vann Van Diepen, one of the estimate’s main authors, has spent the last five years trying to get America to accept Iran’s right to enrich uranium. Mr. Van Diepen no doubt reckons that in helping push the estimate through the system, he has succeeded in influencing the policy debate in Washington. The bureaucrats may even think they are stopping another war.
Vann Diepen also shares a lack of experience in dealing with Iran or the region.

The third main author comes in for particular criticism in the Wall Street Journal editorial. Kenneth Brill served as the US Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (the IAEA). This is an agency that has served to enable Iranian’s quest for nuclear weapons. The head of the IAEA, Mohammed ElBaradei, has even been called a friend by the Iranian regime. As he should be, for he has been an enabler of its nuclear weapons program and has stiff-armed European Union diplomats who have worked to restrain Iran.

Elbaredei and the IAEA have over-reached and now seek to control diplomatic negotiations with Iran — a function that is beyond its mandate. Brill was apparently unwilling to stop this mission creep and put an end to Elbaradei’s efforts to help Iran. Or, as the Wall Street Journal hints, maybe he was just incompetent. This hint comes from former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton’s (who headed counter-proliferation efforts in the State Department previous to his UN posting) new book:
For a flavor of their political outlook, former Bush Administration antiproliferation official John Bolton recalls in his recent memoir that then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage “described Brill’s efforts in Vienna, or lack thereof, as ‘bull — .'” Mr. Brill was “retired” from the State Department by Colin Powell before being rehired, over considerable internal and public protest, as head of the National Counter-Proliferation Center by then-National Intelligence Director John Negroponte.
Brill also has no previous history of experience dealing with Iran. (He graduated from Business School at Berkeley in 1973!).

All three of the authors of this NIE study are former State Department employees (none of them are nuclear physicists). All who are familiar with the ways of Washington know that the State Department is a fourth branch of government — at least in its own collective mind — that seeks to forge its own policies which may often conflict with the policies desired by its putative boss, the President. Washington being Washington, this desire can manifest itself in ways fair and foul .

As the Bush Administration winds down to its conclusion, perhaps these three authors are angling for positions in the new Administration (presumably a Democratic one). They may hope to be rewarded for their “analysis” since Democrats are already using this report for partisan gain.

We have three State Department flexing their muscles to derail our policy towards Iran. This has apparently had a ripple effect, as our allies have expressed a belief that this NIE report will stop efforts to enact a new round of sanctions against Iran. Who gains? Iran.

This is one more step that will be noted in the future that enabled Iran to develop a nuclear arsenal.*

* Recent reports, by Kenneth Timmerman and others, indicate that a single human source may be responsible for the conclusions of the NIE. This would probably be a former aide to the Iranian defense minister and a retired general with long service in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard (recently categorized as a terrorist entity) who disappeared in Europe earlier in the year.

One should recall the notorious Curveball — also a human source — whose “stories” led the CIA to conclude that Iraq had an active WMD program. Curveball lied and our use of him for intelligence has been widely castigated. Are we relying now on an Iranian with a long history of service to the Iran Revolutionary Guard for our intelligence? Could he be a plant to distort our intelligence? Has history repeated itself as a farce and as a tragedy?

The War the Intelligence Community is Waging on America

The proper way to read this report is through the lens of the long struggle the professional intelligence community has been waging against the elected civilian administration in Washington. They have opposed President Bush on nearly every major policy decision. They were against the Iraqi National Congress. They were against elections in Iraq. They were against I. Lewis Libby. They are against a tough line on Iran.

One could call all this revenge of the bureaucrats. Vann Van Diepen, one of the estimate’s main authors, has spent the last five years trying to get America to accept Iran’s right to enrich uranium. Mr. Van Diepen no doubt reckons that in helping push the estimate through the system, he has succeeded in influencing the policy debate in Washington. The bureaucrats may even think they are stopping another war.

It’s a dangerous game that may boomerang, making a war with Iran more likely.

…So much for diplomatic pressure in the run up before the mullahs have their bomb. And so the options for preventing the Islamic Republic from going nuclear get progressively more narrow. What it means is that when the historians look back on this period, they will see that by sabotaging our diplomacy, our intelligence analysts have clarified the choice before the free world — appeasement or war.

Iran-Nuke Intel: Politics Trumps American Security in Bogus NIE Report

My suspicions ran rampant the moment the media began singing hosanna’s of the NIE’s report that became the darling story of the Defeat At All Cost Brigades. The news since Ahmadinejad’s first address to the UN in 2005, where he subsequently announced that he had a “divine” epiphany of destroying America while we sat helpless, has been one confirmation after another from his regime that Iran is on the fast-track to nuclear weapons status.

As forthcoming and truthful as a CNN-hosted political debate, the NIE report has become the Hail Mary Pass for the Anti-war Left, who were screaming against any action against Iran’s nuclear program, or their madman’s proclamations of starting an Apocalypse to fulfill his nation’s supposed destiny in bringing back the 12th Imam.

But true to our suspicions – comes word that the NIE report was written by political hacks and their analysts – not by actual members of the spook community:

A highly controversial, 150 page National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear programs was coordinated and written by former State Department political and intelligence analysts — not by more seasoned members of the U.S. intelligence community, Newsmax has learned.

Its most dramatic conclusion — that Iran shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003 in response to international pressure — is based on a single, unvetted source who provided information to a foreign intelligence service and has not been interviewed directly by the United States.

We discover that this is not new with political operatives running loose inside America’s national security operatus:

This carrot and stick approach has been the State Department’s preferred policy for the past 27 years, and has only strengthened the resolve of Iran’s leaders to continue defying the United States.

Of course as Timmerman’s article points out – the Democrats and the Ron Paul and Anti-war brigades are giddy as a schoolgirl in Spring over the NIE report, which really serves the interests of Ahmadinejad and his quest for destroying the Great and Little Satan. Jihadists from Bin Laden to Ahmadinejad understand just as Vietnamese General Giap noted in his memoirs, that America’s defeat lies not on the battlefield, but in securing the defeat of America at home by the anti-war forces, and striking a killing blow upon our retreat. It would seem that the NIE operatives are willing to work with the Democrats and the Anti-war Left to serve that defeat up on a Silver platter if it means attaining political power, regardless of the costs we may endure down the road. At best the NIE is completely clueless and has absolutely no idea what is really going on inside Iran’s nuke program outside of what they hope, and at worst – they do not care.

Iran could not wish for better freinds.

If anything is clear from the new National Intelligence Estimate, it’s that the U.S. intelligence agencies have no clear idea of what’s going on in Iran. The authors of the intelligence estimate concede that despite their earlier conclusions they can’t really say how far Iran’s nuclear program has advanced, or how close Iran is to developing atomic weapons. It’s irrefutable that Iran may have a nuclear weapon in the foreseeable future — whether in 2009, 2013 or 2015 is not so clear.

The only weapon the Democrats want to employ against our enemies in the Middle East is a white flag. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, as wobbly on Iran as on the Iraq war, says the Bush administration should be pushing for a “surge in diplomacy” with dealing with Iran.

Mr. Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats have a “can we talk?” message for the terrorists in Iraq — where Tehran, working through proxies, has been actively working to destabilize the country and kill and maim American soldiers. They’re eager to embarrass President Bush and denying sufficient funding to the military to do the job against al Qaeda terrorists for another year is the way they’re determined to embarrass him.

Par for the course it would seem, with an intelligence apparatus that has become nothing more than a domestic political tool that our enemies have learned how to use against us by appealing to the selfish motives of power that our intel services are consumed with. After all, Congress and the Left have steadily worked for decades to undermine and deconstruct our military and intelligence capabilities.

As this article details, our intelligence agencies have missed the mark from everything from the deposing of the Shah in 1979 to 9-11, due a history of political meddling and efforts to undermine and politicize the one tool we most desperately need in this world to stay one step ahead of our enemies. As the analysis of the article reveals:

Democrats, with occasional exceptions, have spent a quarter century of undermining, mismanaging and debunking our military and our intelligence capabilities (including attempts to abolish the CIA) …no fair-minded person can ignore that on several critical fronts our intelligence was wrong and our decisions based on false assumptions and erroneous information. The Bush team has likewise been slow to deal with homeland security issues satisfactorily, most notably border issues.

Much hay will continue to be made by the media and the Anti-war Left of this NIE report.

But one has to ask, since this is the SAME NIE group that gave “High confidence” info of Iran’s threshold of attaining nuke capability in 2005 – with documented evidence that Tehran was “Much further along than we thought” – were they lying or mistaken then, or are they lying now?

Remembering how shocked and surprised they all were when Pakistan and India suddenly tested nuclear bombs that our Intelligence had assumed were decades from being able to create – I can only assume from recent history that America will one day awaken to a similar suprise of Iran detonating a nuclear weapon, much sooner than we would have thought – and hopefully not from within an American or Israeli city.

Given Ahmadinejad’s promises of a “world without America” and “Wiping Israel from the map” – such a hope may be nothing but a fool’s hope at best.