It's B**ls**t Day At Josh Marshall's

I'm generally pretty admiring of Josh Marshall; he's an unabashed partisan but usually one with a fair respect for facts and sense.

Today, not so much.

First, he gets spun by Juan Cole's mistranslation of the Iranian threat to Israel. Here's Marshall citing Cole:

According to Farsi-speaking commentators including Juan Cole, a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan, Ahmadinejad's exact quote was, "The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." Cole has written that Ahmadinejad was not calling for the "Nazi-style extermination of a people," but was expressing the wish that the Israeli government would disappear just as the shah of Iran's regime had collapsed in 1979.

When Cole made his post, a commenter here at Winds took him to school:

I am Iranian, and I can tell you Cole is wrong.

Let's start with simple fact, that is not directly relevant. He writes that Khomaini said the Shah government "must go". But "az bain bayad berad" does not mean "go", it litterarly mean something like "must cease to exist", and the most direct translation would be "must be destroyed".

Now to the latter part:

"bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad"
The translation is not perfect, the dear Professor is not convewing the action implyied the sentence, as I or any Iranian would read it.

So Cole errs, or lies, and somehow it becomes a part of the historical record...

Next he catches McCain in a double-secret intellectual jujitsu hold.

...But that's really secondary to the real issue which is that the strategic aim of the surge has failed. It's fastened us down even more firmly in Iraq whereas the aim was to jumpstart a political process in the country that would allow us to begin to disengage.

These points are completely lost on McCain. A savvy campaign should be able to make McCain's failure to understand the surge's failure into a potent political issue.

So the disagreement becomes a flat disagreement over facts; the problem, of course is that this presupposes that the issue isn't whether McCain disagrees - because we've already assumed facts that make McCain wrong - so no debate is possible or even desirable.

The last time I saw intellectual jujitsu that slick was last week, when the data showed that the oceans were stubbornly not warming up:

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them.