Truth is Sedition & Falsehoods are Patriotism

Oh, those silly neocons

Ann Wright can be charged with sedition for telling the truth. But the consequence for telling a lie is a little embarrassment, especially when the whopper (and it’s a huge one) is about an official “enemy”:

A Canadian newspaper apologized Wednesday for an article that said Iran planned to force Jews and other religious minorities to wear distinctive clothing to distinguish themselves from Muslims.

The National Post ran the piece on its front page Friday along with a large photo from 1944 that showed a Hungarian couple wearing the yellow stars that the Nazis forced Jews to sew to their clothing….

But the National Post, a longtime supporter of Israel and critic of Tehran , admitted Wednesday it had not checked the piece thoroughly enough before running it.

"It is now clear the story is not true," Douglas Kelly, the National Post's editor in chief, wrote in a long editorial on Page 2. "We apologize for the mistake and for the consternation it has caused not just National Post readers, but the broader public who read the story."

The article was based on a column by Iranian expatriate writer Amir Taheri, who said a law being debated by Iran 's parliament would force Jews to sew a yellow strip of cloth to their clothes.

Christians would wear a red strip while Zoroastrians would wear a blue one.

Iranian lawmakers, including the country's sole Jewish parliamentarian, have flatly denied the National Post story, saying there is no mention of discriminatory measures against religious minorities in a new dress code bill. (link)

It turns out that the author of this yarn, Amir Taheri, is a member of a public relations firm stacked with some of the who’s who in the neocon pantheon: James Woolsey, Richard Perle, Richard Pipes, etc (link) (also see here).

Some of these clowns were part of the policy group (PNAC) that was responsible for the initial disinformation that helped propel the USA to war with Iraq over their nonexistent WMD program. It shouldn’t be surprising, therefore, to see them associate Iran with awful reminders of the yellow stars Nazis made Jews wear on the clothing at the onset of the holocaust. Such vicious smears often act as the ideological preparation for a nation prior to a military action or to spur a populace to support one. Still, if I had a Jewish relative murdered during the holocaust, I would be angrier than hell that Amir Taheri has apparently belittled the horrible truth of the holocaust by associating it with a falsehood.*

Will someone donate the Heritage Foundation a calculator?

When think tanking gets confused with patriotic pep rallies and quasi religious revival meetings, mistakes are bound to happen. Sometimes really complex ones like, say, addition and multiplication mistakes.

You’ve probably heard about those dark-skinned Spanish speakers “invading” the USA across our southern border. You know who I mean—the ones who come here to kick back and live off our welfare programs and drive up our crime rates. Well, the Heritage Foundation, being the good, patriotic, objective thinkers they are, got very concerned about those foreigners and performed a study. Well, lo and behold, they discovered that if Senate Bill 2611 were passed (the one with the guest worker provision), the invaders would drive up our welfare costs to astronomical levels, as much as $30 billion a year!

Except it isn’t so. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office performed their own study and it turns out that the Heritage Foundation could use a new calculator:

Even without considering the effects of the increases in revenues that would result from S. 2611, the CBO analysis of the budgetary impact of the legislation indicates that the costs of the bill’s provisions would be a fraction of the cost that Heritage estimates. The official CBO cost estimate of S. 2611 goes through 2016. In that year, CBO estimates that the legalization provisions would lead to about $2.8 billion in federal benefit costs for Social Security, Medicare, Supplemental Security Income and the food stamp program.[2] The largest portion of these costs are for Social Security and Medicare benefits, for which the immigrants must have paid payroll taxes, like other retirees. CBO estimates that the legalization provisions also would increase expenditures for refundable tax credits (primarily the Earned Income Tax Credit) by $2 billion in 2016. The total increase in federal benefit expenditures due to the legislation provisions thus would be about $4.8 billion in 2016, according to CBO. This is a fraction of the eventual annual cost claimed by Heritage….

CBO also produced an estimate of the “fully phased-in” costs of the legalization provisions of the bill — which CBO found to be $6.9 billion per year (in 2016 dollars). This is less than one-fourth of the Heritage estimate of $30 billion per year.

Furthermore, once the effect of taxes is considered, the CBO data suggest it is likely that the net costs of the legalization provisions will be close to zero, not $30 billion per year. (link)

Damn, what do you know about that? Those immigrant workers would actually pay for themselves. If it weren’t for their dark skin and foreigner language, even wingnuts might think “paying for themselves” makes them ideal legal immigrants if not actual American citizens. But the wingnuts that support the Heritage Foundation are too jingoistic for that conclusion.

Still, you have to give Heritage credit for the staggering hyperbole of their "error." When they say legislation will create an annual cost of about 30 billion dollars, they don't mind being off on their estimate by about 30 billion dollars. They must be confident the faithful will believe anything they say.
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* According to the Jewish Week, the Los Angeles Simon Wiesenthal Center might have played a role in giving the story some confirmation. As covered here on Delaware Watch, they were directly involved in telling a whopper about Chavez.

UPDATE:

Unsurprisingly, Ryan Silberstein, a local perpetrator of political frauds, glommed onto the neocon lie about Iran as if it were absolute truth. But then he explicitly believes the ends justify the means. (link)

UPDATE 2:

Apparently when the National Post issued its apology for printing the phony story, it did so behind its online "paywall," meaning that unless you subscribe, you'll never know they screwed up. A move that helps to preserve the credibility of the slanderous story for some readers and and is good for business: you have to buy a subscription to the National Post to learn it's so shoddy that you might not want to buy a subcription.

Meanwhile Ryan Silberstein was so distraught to learn that the National Post story was a fraud that he decided to smear and lie about the messanger: me. He suggests that by pointing out the story was a hoax, I am "defending Iran."

He's merely another RF'er.

ed: RB