It’s been the talk of the liberal media since it broke, and when subscribers to the New Yorker magazine open their latest issue of toilet paper substitute they will be greeted with the stunning revelation that:

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.

In fact, it would be a total dereliction of duty for the Bush Administration NOT to be planning for the contingency of having to attack Iran to stop their nuclear weapons program. There are people in the departments of state and defense whose jobs are to develop just such contingency plans for every conceivable threat.

As the world's only superpower, it is our duty not only to our national security but the security and stability of the world that we develop plans to neutralize regimes that threaten to destabilize whole regions of the globe and there is no dispute that Iran fits that category. But the lefties at the New Yorker can turn this whole thing on its head by first throwing the insinuation that there is something wrong with making contingency plans for dealing with our enemies then throwing in the little "twist" that contingency plans include tactical nukes.

"Crack investigative reporter" Seymour Hersh throws together a bunch of "quotes" and innuendo from: Current and former American military and intelligence officials; a government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon; one former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration; one military planner; one high-ranking diplomat; a senior Pentagon adviser on the war on terror; a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, who did not take part in the meetings but has discussed their content with his colleagues; a former high-level Defense Department official; one recently retired high-level Bush Administration official, who is also an expert on war planning; one European diplomat; a European intelligence official; another diplomat in Vienna; -- that's twelve unnamed "sources" and a handful that actually had names -- to put together a long-winded piece of conjecture that Middle East expert Daniel Pipes described this morning on Fox News’ Fox and Friends “more speculation than substance”.

Pipes is absolutely right: Why would we believe that this long-winded piece of vomitus is anything more than pure speculation when, in fact the vast majority of the story is nothing more than the a mishmash of speculative BS collected from a dozen or so unnamed sources who may or may not have any connection to the Bush Administration, may or may not be actual sources and may or may not even know what the hell they're talking about.

We should expect no less than low-rent, breathlessly over-hyped crap from Hersh who is known for breathlessly over-hyped crap: Hersh is the one that nearly-single-handedly turned parading around naked Iraqis in dog collars into the worst type of "torture" imaginable by "breaking" the Abu Graib "torture" story. Both of these stories were and are over-hyped crap written by someone who a couple decades ago probably wouldn't have been able to get them ink in the Weekly World News, the tabloid that once quoted unnamed sources as saying that Rush Limbaugh gets his marching orders from Martians in a spaceship hovering above the Florida coast or some such crap.

But Hersh couldn't do it on his own: The rest of the liberal media are active participants in creating bogus stories about the Bush Administration where no stories exist and whipping them into a frenzy, beating on them and beating on them until they begin to influence public opinion in the direction they desire.

Liberal media bias leaps out at us from all directions, but there are occasions when it leaps up, smacks us on the collective ass and says "how in the hell can you possibly ignore me?" and "if you can you must be blind" and the "Bush wants to nuke Iran" story is just the latest in a huge line of war stories that have come one after the other in a lame and very transparent attempt to discredit the Bush Administration and their valiant attempts to deal with global terror.

What we've got here is the same thing we have in the "domestic wiretapping" story and the "prisoner abuse" story and the "we're losing the war" story and the "Iraq civil war" story and the "number of dead soldiers" story and on and on and on: A series of preemptive strikes against the inherent right we have to defend ourselves and our allies against the threat of global terror. Seymour Hersh is anti-war, anti-defense, anti-American and, above all, anti-Bush, and this latest preemptive media strike on our right to self defense and our duty to secure peace through strength in the world is as lame as all the rest.

The little ruse Hersh and the rest of the liberal media are pulling in the hype over this story and every other non-story involving the War on Terror is pretty transparent: Weave a tale of semi-plausible fact and outright hyperbole that is completely unverifiable due to the fact that the majority of the sources are anonymous; spin it to make it look as though something that should be a normal and essential function of government is really a sinister plot by a president pre-determined by the liberal media to be a war monger, then sit back as your liberal media buddies take it from there are create a huge scandal out of nothing.

The whipped cream on this steaming pile of crap that Hersh and his buddies would have you believe is a hot fudge sundae are the comments of useful idiot politicians such as John F'in Kerry opining that it is unconscionable that we would use a tactical nuke for what it was designed for -- busting nuclear bunkers buried well below ground in concrete. In a few days the cherry on top will come: "Public opinion" polls that use leading questions to make us believe that the majority of Americans are absolutely horrified at the thought that we would do anything we could to defend our freedom and advance the cause of peace and security in the world. Viola! The "all we are saying is give peace a chance at the expense of our country as we know it" crowd in the liberal media has set it up so that any -- ANY -- military action Bush or successive conservative presidents take to defend our sovereignty is viewed as a near-criminal act.

Meanwhile, despite the slanted, vitriolic, misleading hype spewed forth by Hersh and his buddies, we still have a War on Terror to fight. The logical next front in this War on Terror is the country that is currently headed by a madman who may have been an active participant in the hostage crisis a certain unnamed Democrat botched 25 years ago. For the slower among you, that's Iran and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and they're in hot pursuit of nuclear weapons which they have sworn to use if not on us, then on our scrappy ally in the Middle East -- Israel.

If the liberal media campaign to criminalize our self-defense succeeds, what then? Diplomacy, otherwise known as begging some pissant country to pretty please put down the nukes? United Nations sanctions? We know how well those have worked in the past. The simple fact of the matter is that the only thing crazed tin-pot, third world nuts like Iran's president Ahmadinejad respond to is force. If Seymour and his leftist peacenik buddies in the press succeed in their preemptive strike against using military force when needed to put down dangerous, despotic regimes, God help us all. Let's hope we're smarter than to allow our opinions to be swayed by a bunch of liberal muckrakers slinging half-baked tabloid crap.