Less explosive than Clinton’s pants.

When things are this bad you have to take your entertainment where you can, so I have been waiting with baited breath to see how the kool-aid drinking portion of the Right will spin the al Qa Qaa issue into “no big deal.”

Bush campaign spokesman “Steve Schmidt says”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_10_24.php#003785: “John Kerry has no vision for fighting and winning the War on Terror, so he is basing his attacks on the headlines he wakes up to each day.”

Considering how abysmally bad Bush’s vision on the war on terror has been, “stop doing stupid shit” strikes me as a valid enough vision for any opposition party.

There is also what Talking Points Memo calls the “FUBAR defense”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_10_24.php#003785: “: “In the grand scheme — and on a grand scale — there are hundreds of tons of weapons, munitions, artillery, explosives that are unaccounted for in Iraq. And like the Pentagon has said, there is really no way the U.S. military could safeguard all of these weapons depots or find all of these missing materials.”

Which reads kind of like this: “I’m sorry I totaled your car, but considering how many pedestrians I killed too, it doesn’t seem like that big a deal.” As to “well, there was just too much to safeguard” — what moron goes into a country with the intention of disarming said country _without enough people to disarm the country_? A moron who thinks swagger replaces competence, I suppose.

Commenter ‘X’ on _Political Animal_ “tries out the conventional explosives: big effin’ deal”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_10/004985.php#309173 approach:

bq. The explosive power of amatol (TNT and ammonium nitrate) is not that different from MX or RDX. Amatol is the explosive commonly used in artillery shells. Given that the Iraqis seem to have an unlimited supply of old artillery shells, the hype given to this lost 350 tons of explosives, seems unfounded.

I am sure that all of our soldiers who have been maimed or killed, and their families, by such explosives are glad to know they are just conventional weapons and therefore pose no _serious_ threat. As to the claim that it might as well be TNT, 1) TNT is still pretty damn scary, despite its clichéd use in Road Runner cartoons, and 2) I don’t believe it (but I don’t have time to become an explosives scientist right now).

What I have not yet heard is “so, you see, there _were_ weapons of mass destruction after all!” Which is surprising, because it suggests there *is* at least some intellegence left in the Bush Appologist camp. That is undoubtedly an argument that is bound to backfire.

*UPDATE:* “Tapped takes an early stab”:http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/10/index.html#004537 at putting explosives science in human-readable format. Hopefully iin the next day or so we will see fancy infographics and such to let us know just what it is we’ve turned over to terrorists/rebels/whathaveyou because Bush was too eager to get pictures of statues toppling in Bagdad to _get the job done_.

*UPDATE II:* “Tapped has some back-of-the-napkin calculations”:http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/10/index.html from “Phil Carter”:http://inteldump.powerblogs.com/.