You have pet whisperers—in our household it’s two parrot whisperers—and you have a war whisperer, that’s Garry Kasparov. The first is a person who “claims to communicate psychically with animals,” but simply uses kindness and patience to induce happiness, and hence compliance, in our companion pets. The second is a clever neoconservative-minded globalist, who ingratiates himself on stupid American media and political elites who share his mindset, and whispers sweet nothings in these asses’ ears, for the opportunistic purpose of bending their will to his.

One war whisperer is chess master Garry Kasparov convincing MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, today, that warring with Putin is a good for America. Another was Judith Miller’s old flame, Ahmad Chalabi, who was an Iraqi conman who fed the New York Times’ mindless Miller, now with Fox News, with misinformation that helped make the war on Iraq happen.

UPDATE: “Ahmed Chalabi died of a heart attack in Baghdad on Tuesday aged 71.” Had he not invited America to invade Iraq, he might have received better medical care. Iraq was quite civilized BB (Before Bush). In Canada we had Iraqi neighbors, who were most certainly NOT refugees.

Patrick Cockburn’s piece about the man is nicely nuanced:

… The accusation made against Chalabi after 2003 was that he had lured the US and its allies into a disastrous invasion of Iraq by fabricating or manipulating evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In time, he became the scapegoat for politicians and journalists looking for somebody else to blame for their own failures and falsehoods.

The charge seemed to me to be absurd because it is the business of the political exile to pass on damaging information, true or false, about the government he or she is trying to overthrow. Only the laziest or most naïve of journalists should have imagined that information put their way by Chalabi – or any other Iraqi exile – was non-partisan. …