They do read books...

Digby takes issue with Tristero's "vague implication that the Republicans failed to read books about mid-east regional issues, Muslim history or arab culture".

So it really isn't quite fair to say the Republicans and the braintrusts of Donald Rumsfeld's military didn't educate themsleves about arab culture or politics. They did --- by consulting looney, tin-foil conspiracy theorists and discredited comic-book racist tracts. (They also watched "The Sands of Iwo Jima" at least twice.)

Remember, they don't believe they have to be part of the reality-based community. That's for silly losers like us --- and those 650,000 dead Iraqis.

And then Digby notes that Richard Clarke has already attested to this sad fact.

Richard Clarke wrote in his book "Against All Enemies":

Finally, Wolfowitz turned to me. "You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist."

I could hardly believe it, but Wolfowitz was actually spouting the totally discredited Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue.