Your modern GOP ladies and gentlemen…now determined to believe that the reason Bush isn’t popular is because he is neither dumb enough, nor war mongering enough. While people seem drawn to the fact that the Democrats don’t have a unified message and criticize them or even laugh at them, the GOP’s problem is that they have a message — an awful one.

War, what is it good for? Well, them.

To a certain extent Eisenhower’s warning has been gleefully ignored by both parties. They both love to dump money into a top heavy, hardware-based military that keeps the pork flowing to hundreds of Congressional Districts. But while Democrats uniformly love the pork as much as the GOP, the latter loves to watch shit done get blow’d up, blow’d up real good. Generating even more cash on the taxpayers’ dime. And now that we’ve pissed people off even more by bombing them, we need to spend even more money to keep them from swimming over here to bomb us — or in Lou Dobb’s world, preventing Mitt Romney’s Mexican gardeners from planting a bomb under his rhododendrons. For them, perpetual war is the thing that really does give life meaning — a constant state of paranoia and bullying. It’s also the great way to call their disagreeing fellow citizens traitors and browbeat them into submission.

And when reality raises its head, to the extent that even Bush has to accept it…well, that just won’t do:

Senate Republicans are planning to call for a congressional commission to investigate the conclusions of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran as well as the specific intelligence that went into it, according to congressional sources…Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) said he plans to introduce legislation next week to establish a commission modeled on a congressionally mandated group that probed a disputed 1995 intelligence estimate on the emerging missile threat to the United States over the next 15 years.

Golly, that sounds kind of dubious on the surface, can it be any more questionable? Why yes, voices in my head, it can:

While other NIEs have been the subject of intense criticism — most recently the 2002 assessment on Iraq’s program to develop weapons of mass destruction — critics of the new assessment are modeling their response after the clash over a 1995 NIE on ballistic missile threats. That document concluded that no country other than the major declared nuclear powers "would develop or otherwise acquire a ballistic missile over the next 15 years that will threaten the contiguous 48 states or Canada."

President Bill Clinton used the NIE to veto a fiscal 1996 defense authorization bill that would have required deployment by 2003 of a missile defense system capable of defending all 50 states, a project costing tens of billions of dollars.

But a congressionally mandated commission, headed by Donald H. Rumsfeld, who would become President Bush’s defense secretary, concluded in 1998 that the United States "might have little or no warning before operational deployment of a ballistic missile by a hostile Third World country." Its conclusions formed the basis for the Bush administration’s push for a missile defense system.

Ah, Reagan’s "Star Wars" that’s been a tremendous fraud-based cash cow for the arms industry in the name of incredibly stupid policy for a quarter-century now. So par for the course then, what a great precedent to follow, no wonder Rummy has so many ‘Medals of Freedom’.

The article then goes on to quote Norman Podhoretz (without mentioning he’s on Rudy’s foreign policy advice team) and Danielle Pletka, of the AEI who is paid to breathe and dream up awesome ‘World of Warcraft’ tournaments:

"The problem is not the nature of the intelligence, it’s the nature of the presentation. This NIE was presented with a clear intention to deceive and to redirect foreign policy," wrote Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute, in an e-mail. "I have no doubt that these people believe they are protecting the nation from the President, but our constitution doesn’t contemplate the non-proliferation center at the ODNI governing U.S. national security policy."

I seemed to have missed that day in ConLaw I (or II) where Intelligence Analysis was even mentioned in the Constitution. But then again, I’m just a simple man who likes to contemplate and understand the world in which I live. As opposed to cutting out the middleman and blowing up the shit I don’t want to understand.

UPDATE: It’s early in the morning but I should not have missed it, one obvious point comes in comments from eCAHNomics, this is ‘Pearl Harbor Day’, which means the NIE will undoubtedly be cited on right-wing blogs with such a theme repeatedly. Probably accompanied by an incongruent picture of Neville Chamberlain (poor dumb "Conservative" Neville Chamberlain).