Useful Fools

There are many powerful organizations that want to kick Bush out of office. They are showing their hands with their “October Surprises.”

First, we have Mohammed El Baradei, head of the IAEA. Bush, if re-elected, will have him replaced and he knows it. He appears to be the source of athe missing explosives story..

Then we have the New York Times, a leftist remnant of what used to be a great newspaper. They and CBS jumped all over the “missing explosives” story. Before they had enough information to actually know what happened, they were scaring the public by associating this theft with nuclear weapons. The evidence shows that most likely the explosives were removed by Russian Spetznaz troops right before the war, as reported by Bill Gertz, one of the best reporters on national security issues. Meanwhile, Kerry is running around saying Bush was careless to let 380 tons out of 600,000 tons get away. Bush is saying Kerry has poor judgment in his rush to condemn, and Bush is right. ABC says there were only 3 tons of RDX at the site, not 377 tons.

Al Qaeda certainly doesn’t want to miss their chance, so they produced a blood-chilling video tape saying that if Bush is re-elected, blood will run in our streets and we will forget 9-11. However, they didn’t mention their proclivity for killing people no matter what we do, and that if Kerry is elected, they will still try to make blood run in our streets. These guys don’t have a life - they are death nerds - and all they can think about is killing.

Another one that the media amplifiers are just discovering is a report in the Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal. Just by coincidence, they announced a new study (by Johns Hopkins) that shows 100,000 Iraqis were killed by Americans since the end of major hostilities. The International Herald Tribune reports:Editors of the journal decided not to wait for Lancet’s normal publication date next week, but instead to place the research online Friday, conveniently close to the election. The study’s authors are Americans.

Les Roberts, the lead researcher from Johns Hopkins, said the article’s timing was up to him.

“I emailed it in on Sept. 30 under the condition that it came out before the election,” Roberts told The Associated Press. “My motive in doing that was not to skew the election. My motive was that if this came out during the campaign, both candidates would be forced to pledge to protect civilian lives in Iraq.

Does anyone believe that motive? I don’t, especially when you read more of his words:

“I was opposed to the war and I still think that the war was a bad idea, but I think that our science has transcended our perspectives,” Roberts said. “As an American, I am really, really sorry to be reporting this.”

I’m sorry you are reporting it also, because your methodology is inadequate. Furthermore, your insistence on having it come out before the election can only be considered a sign of extreme bias. Since you timed your study to damage Bush, is there the slightest reason we should believe that your study is correct? Why does it produce a number five times the upper bound of the opinion of experts?

The results don’t pass the smell test. The study itself is flawed, which is sad since it came from my daughter’s alma mater. It trusts the reports of Iraqis, many of whom had an incentive to lie - for example, those in Fallujah ini the zone where the rebels are located.. Many Iraqis had an incentive to exaggerate the deaths. The result is a study where the results are automatically skewed high.

The deaths were attirbuted mostly to airstrikes, and yet a small percentage of Iraqis are in areas where post-war air strikes have been done.

The total number of Iraqis surveyed was small. These sorts of studies are common on medical issues, but on political issues they are harder.

The study’s lead author:

“This isn’t about individual soldiers doing bad things. This appears to be a problem with the approach to occupation in Iraq,” Roberts said.

This guy has an axe to grind. He opposed the war, he thinks the occupation is being done wrong even though we are using measures designed to minimize deaths of innocents, and he put his article out just in time to influence the election, but too late for much debate. This is a classic knife in the back to Bush. The conflict of interest of the author destroys the credibility of the study. Other experts are already criticising it, saying the numbers should be 10,000 to 20,000.

Count on this to be a big story designed to hurt George Bush, even though independent exprts from organizations like

I wonder how many more last minute surprises they are going to come up with?