Posted 10:42 AM by Floyd

Aaron Haspel said recently that Reason magazine has gotten worse under Nick Gillespie's editorship. I wouldn't know; I haven't read paper Reason in a while. But could anything be dumber than the Reason Hit and Run blog's "throw everything at the US government and see what sticks" postings?

Here's two egregious examples from today. First, the aforementioned Gillespie pulls a Chomskyite trick: All utterances of American public officials must be 100% factually correct and impeccably moral, else the US is an evil empire:

The most detailed U.S. case for invading Iraq was laid out Feb. 5 in a U.N. address by Secretary of State Colin Powell. Six months later, months of war and revelation, the Powell case can be examined in a new light, analyzed here by an AP correspondent who was in Baghdad, Iraq, when Powell made his case for war.
....

Six months after that Feb. 5 appearance, the file does look thin.

So Powell's speech to a bunch of dictators' errand boys had some holes. Woop. De. Fuckin'. Doo.

But Gillespie calls this "devastating".

For the next revelation, you might want to hang onto your chair. You may want to put your hand over your mouth to keep from screaming. Because what I am going to tell you is shocking and appalling. It appears that US armed forces actually tried to kill people!

Looking for UN-banned weapons in Iraq? You might start with the napalm the military now admits that we dropped.

The poster, Julian Sanchez, couldn't be bothered to do any thinking beyond a cheap shot, so commenter junyo had to do it for him:

...according to the article "...A 1980 UN convention banned the use against civilian targets..." The weapon's not banned, certain uses are. The US (which never signed the 1980 treaty in the first place) used the weapons against dug in troops.

So the weapons aren't actually banned, and the US used them in an acceptable manner. What's the story?

junyo also has the Hit and Run boys beat in the snarkiness department:

"I'm sure that other countries are just racing to create a Tickle Bomb"

Update: Bryan Preston found some, well, devastating information about the reporter who critiqued Powell's speech.