From Adam at Words Mean Things comes word of this excellent article on that other big whopper Bush told in his last State of the Union address: Ex-officials dispute Iraq tie to al-Qaida.

Of course, it’s not really a different lie; it’s the other half of the first one. Taken together, the two assertions (Saddam is actively trying to build nuclear weapons, and is perhaps just months away from having them; Saddam is working directly with al Qaeda) were the slam-dunk that cemented the support of the US public and Congressional Democrats for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Because, you know, we get that whole mushroom-cloud-over-US-cities image in our minds, and in the wake of the 9/11 attacks that’s guaranteed to get a powerful reaction.

Even as debunked by things like Tenet’s mea culpa and the article linked to above, the idea still has traction with lots, maybe even most, of the people in this country. The way the reasoning goes is something like this: Okay, Saddam wasn’t actively trying to get Nigerian uranium. But he could very well decide to get some from somewhere else at some point in the future, and if the UN eases up on him he might eventually manage to join the likes of Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea in actually having nuclear weapons. And maybe he was only having “episodic, not continuous” dealings with al Qaeda. He was still having dealings with them. He could still decide at some point in the future to get together with them and give them some of those as-yet-hypothetical nukes.

The less we actually know, the more our conclusions are based on that murky process whereby we flesh out the unseen details using whatever it is we do know (or think we know). For someone who has never travelled, never read much of anything, and never mingled much with people outside his own narrow social sphere, it’s easy to lump outsiders into the category of “people who don’t deserve the same considerations we (that is, members of our own immediate group) do.” Throw in a little fear, and that process goes into overdrive. So even if the case against Saddam is sketchy to the point of fantasy (at least in terms of his giving nukes to al Qaeda), that fantasy is good enough for us. The worst thing that happens if we’re wrong is that a bunch of Iraqis get maimed and killed, their country’s infrastructure gets blown up, and their society is plunged into a state of perpetual violent chaos. But they’re just Iraqis, so our fears trump their concerns.

Lashing out violently at everyone around you in response to fear is an understandable reaction. It has real survival value in certain contexts. Unfortunately, I don’t think this is one of them. In this case, I think we’re being manipulated by people who have their own, largely unstated, motivations for driving us in this particular direction.

So where does Bush fall in all of this? Interestingly, I think he falls more into the category of those being manipulated, rather than those doing the manipulating. It makes him less a villain and more a victim. But either way, the man has no business being president.

So, here’s the final act in the song-and-dance Bush’s team has been doing all week: CIA director George Tenet has issued a statement taking the blame for the Nigerian-uranium lie in the SOTU. Now Bush graciously grants Tenet his benediction (AP story: Bush expresses confidence in Tenet), Ari declares that “the president has moved on,” and the story’s over, right?

It’s impressive in terms of the choreography, if for nothing else. If safeguarding America, fixing the economy, and successfully invading and rebuilidng other countires were things you could accomplish using only well-coordinated self-serving spin, we’d be in great shape right now. Unfortunately, those things require other abilities, too, and Bush’s team comes up short in pretty much every other area.

But let’s focus on the current flap. I see two major holes in the administration storyline. First is the way Condoleeza Rice wants to have it both ways. Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest has a good write-up: This changes everything. Earlier this week Rice said that the SOTU statements on Niger were revised to reflect CIA concerns (changing the wording to put the focus on British claims, rather than baldly asserting those claims as true). But on Meet the Press on June 8 she said, “We did not know at the time – no one knew at the time, in our circles – maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery.”

No amount of spin can reconcile those two statements; they directly contradict each other. One of them, at least, has to be a lie. And once you’ve accepted that Rice is lying about this, the whole thing falls apart. There’s no way to confine the damage to Tenet, or Rice, or even Cheney (who spent all that time at the CIA “reviewing” intelligence in the run-up to war); they’re all working from the same script. The deception runs seamlessly from top to bottom.

As Nick writes at Morons.org (CIA takes the fall for Bush), it’s ludicrous for Tenet to try to take the blame for “allowing” the President to include the bogus Niger information in the speech. How was he supposed to stop him? Who’s in charge here, anyway?

The notion of presidential authority — and responsibility — in this White House is thoroughly broken. Yes, it’s been obvious since the 2000 campaign that Bush was unqualified to be president. Our collective need to believe in his competence in the wake of 9/11 didn’t change that; it just made it easier for his team to maintain the illusion. But it’s a tight-rope act. His image must be constantly burnished with flattering camera angles and carefully chosen backdrops, his lines must be carefully crafted, the occasional painful ad-libs denied, spun, or ignored until public attention has mercifully moved on.

I’d like to think it’s starting to come apart. A new ABC poll shows that support for Bush has fallen to the lowest level since before 9/11, which I think is a significant threshhold. More and more people are asserting that the emperor has no clothes; check out this excellent piece from Eleanor Clift in Newsweek, for example: No mistakes were made.

My naive side and my cynical side continue to battle with each other. Will Bush win in a landslide in the next election? Or will he be run out of town on a rail? Or will we have another photo finish? When you get right down to it, I honestly have no idea.

Bush & Co. appear to be struggling really hard to shift the coverage away from the Niger yellowcake comments in the SOTU, but so far they’ve had only marginal success. Lots of stories this morning.

First up, from CBS News, which is doing a pretty good Washington-Post-on-watergate impression, two stories, one from yesterday and one from today: Bush knew Iraq info was dubious and Furor over CIA role in WMD claim.

There’s some nice commentary from Kos (Bush knew Iraq info was false) and from Steve Gilliard (Have you no sense of decency, sir? and Let the fingerpointing begin).

There’s also an interesting rant from Justin Raimondo (Mosaic of lies), who seems quite convinced that the original source of the forged Niger documents was none other than Ariel Sharon, whom he charges with running his own off-the-books intellegence operation to bypass those integrity-tainted professionals in Mossad and feed bogus data to Rumsfeld’s and Wolfowitz’s boys in the Office of Special Plans. I’m not that paranoid yet, myself, but I wouldn’t be shocked if turned out to be true; they certainly had motive and opportunity.

So, what does it all mean? It boils down to this: As with Clinton and Monica, where the defense ultimately centered around the assertion that standing immobile while someone gives you a blowjob does not constitute “touching” that person, Bush is seeking cover from the following assertion: Saying “Saddam tried to buy uranium from Niger” when your own intelligence service had told you the story was probably untrue would be a lie. But saying “the British government has learned that Saddam tried to buy uranium from Niger” would be true, because you weren’t saying Saddam had actually tried to do that; you were just saying that Tony Blair believed Saddam had tried to do that.

It doesn’t work for me. Bush didn’t actually say, “the British government believes…” He said “the British government has learned that…” The clear implication is that the British government has learned something that is true. For Bush to say that about information the CIA had already told him was false still lands squarely in the category of “lie”, in my book.

Rice asserts that the change in language was made to soften the assertion from a bald lie to a truthful statement about our (unfortunately misguided) friends the British. As delivered, though, the statement doesn’t come off that way at all. It doesn’t sound like Bush is saying, “Well, the British believe so and so; we can’t confirm it from our end, so take it with a grain of salt.” What it sounds like is, “Hey; it’s not just us talking this way. Even the British know he’s doing this.”

And now they’ve been caught. Those damn spooks at the CIA have too much documentation about the doubts they expressed and when and to whom they expressed them. So make the admission in the form of a written statement from Ari’s office as the president is already winging his way to Africa, then do your best to get the story done and over while filling as many headline inches as you can with jolly stuff about Bush and Laura and daughter Barbara blushing at the sight of mating elephants.

That’s my dubya.

From the fine people at the Cruel Site of the Day comes word of this festive link: Mooning Amtrak Trains, Southern California USA. Woo! Yes, that’s my part of the world, broadly defined. But I think there’s probably a little Laguna Niguel in all of us.

It was more than a year ago, in May of 2002, that Justin Timberlake rocked our world with the news that Britney was not, in fact, a virgin. Well, she has now confirmed it. From CNN: Britney acknowledges she’s not a virgin.

Excuse me. I have to go lie down.

Lots of spin on what-Bush-knew-and-when-he-knew-it with respect to the false claims used to justify the war. First up, from the Guardian, the story of former State Department spy guy Gregory Thielmann: White House ‘lied about Saddam threat’. Next, from the BBC, an unnamed CIA source who says the White House knew all about the discrediting of the Nigerian yellowcake documents 10 months before the State of the Union Address: White House ‘warned over Iraq claim’. Finally, from the Boston Globe’s John Donnelly comes this fun wrap-up of the statements made in the past few days by Ari, Rumsfeld, and Bush: Bush unbowed on Iraq.

There’s lots more good stuff out there. The spin is too obvious to let it lie; even US reporters are asking some good questions.

From the New York Times comes this interesting story about how various parties within the executive branch aren’t being helpful in uncovering the truth about what happened on 9/11: 9/11 commission says US agencies slow its inquiry. Interesting, isn’t it? You wouldn’t think people could get away with impeding an investigation into something so important — unless the foot-dragging was happening because of, rather than in spite of, the orders coming down from the highest levels of the chain of command.

SFGate columnist Ruth Rosen updates her earlier piece applying the Powell Doctrine to the Iraq war, asking, in particular, about just how it is we’re supposed to get out of this mess: What’s the exit strategy? Good stuff on the Iraq/Vietnam comparison; here’s Rosen’s conclusion:

Like ghosts from the past, words and phrases from the Vietnam-era — quagmire, credibility gap, guerrilla war, winning the hearts and minds of civilians, requests for more troops — are creeping back into military and public parlance.

But this is not Vietnam. Finding an exit strategy in Iraq is far more complicated. There is no government that can negotiate a peace treaty with the United States. Until Iraq has a strong government, one that can provide basic services and protect its people, withdrawal of occupation forces is inconceivable.

Perhaps the military mess in Iraq can at least remind Americans how and why the Powell Doctrine, with all its reasonable restraints, prevented the United States from plunging — until now — into another unnecessary and perhaps unwinnable war.

Meanwhile, if the Bush administration — which never articulated clear post- war plans — has an exit strategy, what is it? The Iraqi people, our military forces and the American public have a right to know.

Christopher of EverythingOnce (formerly of NotMyDesk) has finished describing his experience of taking a spoon-bending class (available in Parts One, Two, and Three), and it’s not to be missed.

A quick base-touching on the whole Bush-lied-about-weapons-of-mass-destruction thing. First up: I have to acknowledge the truth. I’ve been wrong, wrong, wrong about WMD this whole time. I hang my head in shame. After carefully reviewing the evidence, and analyzing my statements over and over again, I’ve come to the following inevitable conclusion:

I should never have pluralized the acronym as “WMDs”.

Since WMD expands to “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” it’s plenty plural already, as lots of more-grammatically-astute people have been maintaining all along. But I was casually tossing around unfounded s-appended pluralizations left and right, unwilling to acknowledge the glaring evidence of my own error.

Anyway. Henceforth I shall refer to them only as “WMD”. I apologize sincerely for having resisted so long the admission of what was so painfully obvious.

In the same vein, it was interesting to see the way the White House dealt with the Wilson revelations (the op-ed piece in the New York Times, and the Meet the Press appearance on Sunday), with Ari initially saying, “What? There’s no issue there,” and then, when Fearless Leader was safely on his plane for Africa, issuing written clarifications along the lines of, “well, of course we were wrong; everyone knows that, and has known it for a long time. Except we didn’t know it before the State of the Union Address.” (Except that they clearly did.)

I’m not going to bother linking to all the press coverage of this over the last few days; it’s not hard to find. A few decent starting points would be this piece from the Washington Post: White House backs off claim on Iraqi buy, and this one from The Independent, sent along by Glen & Pilar: Diplomat who blew the whistle on falsified evidence.

The most interesting part of the whole thing has always been this: Given how obvious it was that the version of the Iraqi WMD threat being promoted by Bush before the war was bogus, why would he do it? Why would a politician leave himself so exposed, basing an invasion of another country on a lie that was certain to be revealed as such?

Steve Gilliard at Daily Kos points to one account that sheds some light, possibly: Time to admit the obvious: there are no WMD. The account he points to, and discusses, is this one at Capitol Hill Blue: White House admits Bush wrong about Iraqi nukes. This is the key passage from the CHB story:

An intelligence consultant who was present at two White House briefings where the uranium report was discussed confirmed that the President was told the intelligence was questionable and that his national security advisors urged him not to include the claim in his State of the Union address.

“The report had already been discredited,” said Terrance J. Wilkinson, a CIA advisor present at two White House briefings. “This point was clearly made when the President was in the room during at least two of the briefings.”

Bush’s response was anger, Wilkinson said.

“He said that if the current operatives working for the CIA couldn’t prove the story was true, then the agency had better find some who could,” Wilkinson said. “He said he knew the story was true and so would the world after American troops secured the country.”

The discussion in the comments at Daily Kos about whether or not Capitol Hill Blue is a credible source is interesting; time will tell on that, I guess. If this Wilkinson guy is real, and is really on the record, it should just be a matter of time before the story is in some mainstream news outlet.

If true, it certainly dovetails nicely with the picture that many people, myself very much included, have been building in our heads of Bush. He simply knew better than the so-called experts. His gut told him the WMD were there, God told him the WMD were there; he was on a mission to eradicate Evil, and pointy-headed analysts from the CIA or wherever were not going to get in his way. And since the neocon cabal among his advisors had a longstanding interest in seeing the Iraqi government overthrown by a US invasion in order to further their own ideological agenda, the Commander-in-Chief had plenty of enablers willing to help him set reason and evidence aside and proceed on the basis of his Higher Truth.

Yeah, the real truth was going to come out sooner or later. But at that point the deed would be done. Even if Bush ended up paying a high price personally, that wouldn’t necessarily bother the PNAC folks, as long as their vision of mideast transformation by the US military had been successfully launched. And Bush, bless his tiny little capacity for personal insight, believed he was right, dammit. Reality would rearrange itself to protect him.

Well, maybe it will. There are plenty of people with a compelling emotional need to see Bush vindicated on this. The collective suspension of disbelief only has to carry him through November of next year, at which point he’ll have succeeded as much as it’s possible to succeed in US politics, with enforced retirement thereafter courtesy of the 22nd Amendment. It would be a fitting end for his career, the crowning achievement of a life characterized by repeated personal failure, followed by rescue at the hands of powerful interests unwilling to let that failure reflect badly on themselves.

George W. Bush: our collective underachieving problem child.

Update: “Wilkinson” story acknowledged by CHB to be bogus. Bigtime thanks to Craig for pointing it out in the comments.

This note is for Katie. When I said that piece I’d read that I really liked was from the Christian Science Monitor, I lied. I really liked that piece, too, but the one I was trying to direct you to was the other one, below that, by James Carroll. It actually appeared in the Boston Globe.

Everybody else: Back to your lives, citizens. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Doug Bandow has a great opinion piece running in the Christian Science Monitor: Conservatives’ core duty on WMD. Here’s the real heart of the WMD issue. For those whose willingness to give Bush & Co. the benefit of the doubt has kept them from seeing the WMD thing as a big deal, please consider reading this article, and telling me which part of the author’s argument you disagree with. Or, if you agree with it, let me know what you think would be an appropriate approach to holding Bush accountable.

Here’s an op-ed piece by James Carroll that goes right to the heart of what disturbs me about Bush: Bush’s war against evil. It sounds kind of odd to pull it out of context, but the observation that Bush’s main failing is a lack of imagination is dead on.

In keeping with the ongoing discussion of ways in which the current Iraq war is and isn’t like Vietnam, here’s a piece by Tom Hayden: Say it: This is a quagmire. Not much new evidence, but a different arrangement.

Oh, no! Not another Bush-lied piece on Iraqi WMDs.

Well, no. This one is actually more wide-ranging than that. From freelance journalist David Neiwert, writing in his weblog Orcinus: Bush the liar. It’s a scrupulously thorough exploration of the subject of Bush’s lies in general. Yes, the WMD lies get a special place in the coverage due to their serious and ongoing impact, but the overall picture is much bigger than that. It isn’t just that Bush lied in that particular case. It’s that he lies routinely and shamelessly as part of the daily business of selling himself to the electorate.

Anyway, if you despise Bush, as I do, you’ll like it. If you support him, and think he’s basically an okay guy, and at least as honest as most politicians, you should probably think about reading it, and trying to reconcile your views with the information it contains. Go ahead; do your best. It’s fully sourced; the information is all there.

Or just go on believing what you want to believe. That’s certainly going to be less work, at least.

You won’t have noticed, but I’ve been keeping my obsessed-fanboy side in check for the past several months. Well, I can feel the restraint slipping. We’re well and truly entering the ROTK spoiler season at theonering.net, which means it’s time for everyone, or at least me, to begin thinking continuously about the upcoming conclusion of the Greatest Film Adaptation of All Time.

I think I can restrain myself for at least a little longer, at least as far as posting about it here goes. But I can’t pass up posting about this one. From the truly insane cats at insanecats.com: The Two Towers Movie – Stick Version. Flash required.

Craig recently commented that he thinks characterizations of the current situation in Iraq as a Vietnam-style “quagmire” are inappropriate. He asked there for “a rational and coherent analysis of how this really compares in any specific, factual way to Vietnam.”

“Rational” and “coherent” aren’t phrases that people normally apply to me, but I thought I’d give it a try anyway. Follow the link below, or scroll down, to read the result.
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Interesting Q&A from the latest issue of Adbusters magazine: Early signs of fascism. Thanks to awesome link-suggesters Glen & Pilar for the link.

Interesting survey over at Selectsmart.com that gives you a chance to see which candidate is lining up closest to your general views on some election issues. I took it and, surprise, my top candidate was George Bush! However, I was mildly distressed to see Kerry as my second choice. I just have too much personal distrust in him, as well as his flaky wife, to ever seriously consider him, despite whatever issues in which we may have common ground. Third though was Lieberman, who, if I were ever to vote for a Democrat, would be someone to whom I would give some serious thought.

Anyway, try it and see if it turns out as you would expect.

Slate’s Jack Shafer has a fun piece on how to avoid looking like a chump on Meet the Press: How to beat Tim Russert. I’m not sure it’s ever going to be an issue for me personally, but it’s still a fun article.