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Friday, October 21, 2005

Too-much-coffee Woman

Last weekend, I was channel surfing. When I caught the C-Span wave, there was Karen Hughes, former personal assistant to AWOL and now Undersecretary of State for public diplomacy, nervously looking back and forth, deflecting every question like a hockey goalie. This is one scary woman. "Intense" isn't really intense enough to describe it. Today, she was in Indonesia defending the indefensible--the invasion of Iraq:
"The consensus of the world intelligence community was that Saddam was a very dangerous threat," Hughes said days after the ousted dictator went on trial in Baghdad on charges of murder and torture in a 1982 massacre of 148 Shiites in the town of Dujail.

"After all, he had used weapons of mass destruction against his own people," she told a small auditorium with around 100 students. "He had murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people using poison gas."

Although at least 300,000 Iraqis are said to have been killed during Saddam's decades-long rule - only about 5,000 are believed to have been gassed to death in a 1988 attack in the Kurdish north.

Hughes twice repeated the statement after being challenged by journalists. A State Department official later called The Associated Press to say she misspoke. The official, who was traveling with Hughes, spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to talk publicly to the media.
It's not surprising that somebody is this stupid--there are lots of ignorant people out there. But they most definitely should not be running things.