No FARCing Shit

So, to nobody's real surprise, the U.S. military was apparently involved in last week's rescue of American hostages from everybody's favorite group of Colombian narco-terrorists. The story first broke courtesy of Al Giordano's The Field, a source I immediately distrusted because it egged on my natural inclination to find American military skullduggery everywhere without providing a shred of hard evidence. (Note to Al: a link to another blogger on your own semi-paranoid, pro-legalization site--and that to an article quoting a single, anonymous source--does not a convincing argument make.) My latte liberal sensibilities were assuaged, though, once the news of U.S. involvement made it to NPR. Whew! Now I can believe it!

Howver, Giordano's assertion that the raid was staged to help the political fortunes of John McCain struck me as too much of a stretch. Of course it makes perfect sense that the U.S. was involved in the operation, and I could even believe that Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe wants John McCain to win enough to lend a hand, even possibly inventing a FARC laptop clumsily connecting Obama to Hugo Chavez. Why, though, this little bit of stagecraft would help McCain is beyond me--it's not like what's being sold as a Colombian army operation has registered in any meaningful way with the great middle swath of the electorate he needs. Not to mention the fact that calling attention to his positions on trade probably won't help him with the blue-collar quasi-Clintonites he'll need in November.

Tinfoil hats cannot stop the rays of The October Protocol.