The alleged existence of yellowcake has reared its head in the ten days leading up to the election. Today, I've thrice received an e-mail from desperate right-leaning acquaintances with this subject line:
Check out Uranium Yellowcake Found In Iraq - Truth!
This e-mail contained a link (below) to a site called Truth or Fiction (sort of like Snopes, only with nothing truthy and all fiction—it's a wingnut site), and purports to show "pruf" that WMD were actually found in Iraq! You can read an excellent diary about this from Kossack bubbanomics last July, but since it's coming up again, I thought it would be good to quickly revisit it, especially as we continue to convert some last-minute undecideds.
My practice is to answer most of these BS postings I receive because they have actually changed a few votes, and it's good practice: With the Obama/Biden win, we're going to receive quite a few of them in the coming 8 years as the Rethugs are banished into the political wilderness.
I reprint my response purely for your viewing pleasure, and I hope you find it useful as we all do our best to fight for Truth, Justice, and the (Real) American Way!
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Thanks, _____________!
I read this, and I've received two other e-mails from a friends about this, and my response to both was Oi, gevald! Holy Moly! Stop the Presses! Hold the Phones! Declare Martial Law to Stop the Elections! Repeal the 22nd Amendment, NOW!
Well, actually, not so much...
I found myself responding to the author thus:
Dude, we've been over this!
By yellowcake, do you mean the yellowcake which was well-known by the IAEA and the US since the first gulf war? The Yellowcake ol' Snake Eyes Saddam couldn't use because it was so well known - and under lock and key - which is why there was 550 tons remaining to be shipped to Canada? The Yellowcake the brave George Bush has been mum about, taking a savage beating from the lib'rul media, because he's such a Patr't?
From the actual AP article, back in July 2008:
Tuwaitha and an adjacent research facility were well known for decades as the centerpiece of Saddam's nuclear efforts. Israeli warplanes bombed a reactor project at the site in 1981. Later, U.N. inspectors documented and safeguarded the yellowcake, which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Gulf War.
There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the UN official said.
This is a not-so clever, pretty transparent attempt to combine two entirely separate incidents. The final removal of pre-Gulf War yellowcake this e-mail is loosely based on has no connection whatever to the uranium Joe Wilson inquired about. That was one of the many bogus rationales for the Iraq War, but was the one with the forged Nigerian Documents, the ones that became the basis for the British assertions about yellowcake (later proven wrong); the ones that were inserted into Bush's State of the Union; the ones of which George Tenet famously said, in July 2003, "These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president"...that one, like the others, actually, are still false.
I think that rabid, Anti-American/Leftwing-Commie-Socialist-Pinko-Pig-Terr'rist-Lovin' Pat Buchanan's summary from the same year is still the best, "The truth now, we know, is that a forgery was put together to get this country into a war with Iraq, that forgery found its way into our intelligence agencies, it found its way into the State of the Union, and the president of the United States should show more indignation and outrage that this was done...Somebody in our own government knew very well that was a forgery, and they advanced it on up the line."
Yet, if the two were related (and apparently, they still are not), I sure wish Bush and his cronies would call a press conference, do a convincing PowerPoint show (like the big UN Head-Fake in February 2003), or otherwise just go around the "Left-Wing" media and proclaim the find through prime-time Tee-Vee addresses (like when Chenebush Paulsonnanke socialized our banks and Wall Street recently).
My guess is they can't because there isn't such a connection, but we already knew that....Also. And such as...You betcha! (Thank you for the insightful foreign policy comments, Sarah. Can you see yellowcake from Alaska, too? Really? It has Vanilla Icing? Who'd a thunk it? Also?)
Besides, Faux News is, allegedly, the MSM: They would have experienced bed-wetting, multi-orgasmic glee over there if there were a connection, and it would still be running, and running, and running, and running...Plus, we'd get to find out if Roger Ailes was, indeed, a believer in G-d: he'd have died and gone one way or t'other, and Faux News could have covered the whole thing by doing it live on O'Reilly.
This is sort of like when John Bush McCain asserts, ad nauseum, that he "knows how to get Bin Laden...I know where to find him...I know how to get him"...I wish to G-d he'd share it with our guys on the ground, or at least the ones commanding them in the Pentagon. Might save a few of 'em, y'know?
Also.
S