Topic: WorldNetDaily
Molotov Mitchell devotes his Dec. 16 WorldNetDaily video insisting that "the facts mean nothing to liberals" and that they "make stuff up to get their way." He ends his video by asserting that "liberal research isn't research," adding, "So the next time you hear some hokey liberal 'research,' I want you to pay close attention to the researcher."
We can't help but think that's directed at us. After all, we've detailed how Mitchell has his own issues with the facts. Indeed, just a couple of weeks ago, he chose to believe a convicted murderer's claims over that of law enforcement (and said convicted murderer's previous statements on the issue) regarding the death of Matthew Shepard. Of course, Mitchell has never contradicted anything we've written about him.
And Molotov being Molotov, he doesn't play straight with the facts even when he's accusing others of lying. For instance, he makes a big deal out of claiming that "our troops discovered roughly 500 metric tons yellowcake uranium last year just south of Baghdad," citing MSNBC and CNN to support the claim, which he says contradicts the liberal insistence that there were no WMDs in Iraq.
But the MSNBC (actually, AP) article he cites tells a different story -- it's about about the removal of yellowcake from Iraq, not the discovery of it. (The link he provides for the CNN article he cites does not work.) In fact, the article states: "U.S. and Iraqi forces have guarded the 23,000-acre site — surrounded by huge sand berms — following a wave of looting after Saddam's fall [in 2003] that included villagers toting away yellowcake storage barrels for use as drinking water cisterns." And it was not even discovered by U.S. troops then; as the article states:
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 official said.
Further, yellowcake is not WMD; the uranium located within must be first extracted and refined, then enriched to weapons grade. As even Newsmax concedes, what little nuclear capability Iraq had was dismantled after the first Iraq War, had only achieved low-grade enrichment of 1.8 tons of it, and the technology Iraq had to enrich it was buried for years in the garden of the physicist who ran Saddam's weapons program.
In other words, Iraq did not have anything resembling the capability to do weapons-grade enrichement of uranium after 1991. Parts buried in a garden do not equal capability.
It also wouldn't be Molotov if he didn't engage in a little gay-bashing. He claimed that "lesbian anthropologist" Margaret Mead "fabricated an entire culture taht allegedly promoted rampant promiscuity in her book 'Coming of Age in Samoa,'" adding that "bitter old lesbians still cite her research to this day, even though it's been throughly debunked by other anthropologists and even the outraged Samoans themselves."
That's an apparent reference to Derek Freeman's book attacking Mead's claims. But Mitchell's version of events doesn't appear to square with the facts either (shocking, we know). According to Wikipedia:
After an initial flurry of discussion, many anthropologists concluded that the truth would probably never be known, although most published accounts of the debate have also raised serious questions about Freeman's critique.
First, these critics have speculated that he waited until Mead died before publishing his critique so that she would not be able to respond. In 1978, Freeman sent a revised manuscript to Mead, but she was ill and died a few months later without responding.
Second, Freeman's critics point out that by the time Freeman arrived on the scene Mead's original informants were old women, grandmothers, and had converted to Christianity, so their testimony to him may not have been accurate. They further allege that Samoan culture had changed considerably in the decades following Mead's original research, that after intense missionary activity many Samoans had come to adopt the same sexual standards as the Americans who were once so shocked by Mead's book. They suggested that such women, in this new context, were unlikely to speak frankly about their adolescent behavior. Further, they suggested that these women might not be as forthright and honest about their sexuality when speaking to an elderly man as they would have been speaking to a woman near their own age.
Further, according to Wikipedia, Freeman's own research "documented the existence of premarital sexual activity in Samoa."
What Michell said about "hokey liberal 'research'" goes double for his own, since he seems determined to prove time and time again that right-wing research -- and his especially -- isn't research.
