Joe Klein, Do You Really Think Crazy Pete Is Credible?!?!?!

Mr. emptywheel and I have a running joke about "English Day"–where your dog, for one day only out of his entire life, can speak and understand English. What would we learn in that one day, we speculate, when McCaffrey the MilleniaLab could tell us precisely what he was thinking?

Which gives me another cool idea–"Source Day"–where for one day, we can see all of the sources that journalists use and consider credible. Because there’s nothing that would damage journalists’ credibility further than to discover that they consider certifiable loons like Pete Hoekstra credible.

But that’s just what–thanks to Christy–Joe Klein apparently believes. From Crazy Pete’s column in NRO:

As one of Klein’s sources for the complex technical and legal pointsthat seem to be in contention — and because Klein, his critics, andDemocrats in Congress have accused Republicans of trying to“misrepresent” these issues — it is important to correct and clarifythe record on three critical points, which also bear heavily on thebroader debate currently at hand.

Crazy Pete’s column, btw, is no more coherent than Joe Klein’s articles on the topic, so I guess we can surmise where Klein borrowed his abysmal logic from.

But here’s the thing. Crazy Pete is, well, crazy. He’s one of the guys who still believes that Iraq had WMDs. He’s the guy who thought it’d be a good idea to put a bunch of Iraqi documents (and Al Qaeda documents dumped in just for fun) online, regardless of the fact that the documents included plans from Iraq’s pre-1991 nuke program. He’s the guy who hired Fred Fleitz to write propaganda on Iran for the HPSCI.

In short, he’s nuts, and very much in the business of creating propaganda. And that’s the guy that Joe Klein finds so credible that he’s unwilling to refute, even if the plain language of the document in question proves he is wrong.