Crappy Instapundit link of the day

Instapundit points to this inane post by Gateway Pundit where he appears to ask the question, "If a lunatic walked up to you and claimed that the earth is round, would you believe him? Or would you consider his lunacy to be a factor in your decision and refuse to believe him?"

The Gateway Pundit apparently would refuse to believe that the earth is round. This is what happened. Ray McGovern, a retired CIA analyst, recently heckled Donald Rumsfeld, asking him why he had lied that he knew where the WMDs were being stored in Iraq (via C&L).

Rumsfeld: ...it appears that there were not weapons of mass destruction there.

McGovern: You said you knew where they were.

Rumsfeld: I did not. I said I knew where suspect sites were and...

McGovern: You said you knew where they were. Tikrit, Baghdad, northeast, south, west of there. Those are your words.

Rumsfeld: My words-my words were that-no-no, wait a minute--wait a minute. Let him stay one second. Just a second....

As C&L points out, this is what Rumsfeld had actually said before.

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, weapons of mass destruction. Key goal of the military campaign is finding those weapons of mass destruction. None have been found yet. There was a raid on the Answar Al-Islam Camp up in the north last night. A lot of people expected to find ricin there. None was found. How big of a problem is that? And is it curious to you that given how much control U.S. and coalition forces now have in the country, they haven't found any weapons of mass destruction?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Not at all. If you think -- let me take that, both pieces -- the area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.

Gateway Pundit, in spite of that fact being common knowledge, flies off on a tangent, calling McGovern a nut, pointing to his anti-Bush opinions and activities, as if doing that somehow erases Rumsfeld's blatant mendacity from the chart. And isn't that the problem with America today? If someone points out or says something that shows the administration in a bad light, just set your dogs on him. And that's what Gateway Pundit does in this bizarre post, linked to approvingly by Big Daddy Glenn Reynolds.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Update : Glenn Greenwald adds that the links provided by Gateway Pundit do not, in any way, attest to McGovern's alleged "nutcasery".