More ‘Bush Lied’ Commentary
Here’s a quick roundup of some of the better stuff on the ‘Bush lied’ story, as fueled by Bush and the offensive linemen of Team GOP having decided to push it lately:
- Kevin Drum: Manipulating intelligence and Abuse of power.
- Joshua Micah Marshall: Kevin Drum had a piece up last night…, First the White House lashed out…, and It seems that National Security Advisor Stephen J. Hadley…
- Fred Kaplan: I was wrong, but so were you — Parsing Bush’s new mantra.
- Ryan Lizza: Con text: Bush’s dishonest new strategy for defending the war.
- The NYT editors: Decoding Mr. Bush’s denials.
I think it’s pretty clear that if we’re playing this by the rules, Bush loses the debate, bigtime. He’s basically making the same type of bullshit argument about his actions in the run-up to the war that he was making back then about Saddam and his nukes and ties to al-Qaeda.
But it’s a hallmark of the Bush team’s response when they get backed into a corner like this that they don’t play to win some kind of fair, high-minded debate. Look at how they reacted when Richard Clarke went public with his dynamite accusations about how Bush had ignored the threat of al-Qaeda during the first nine months of his administration. Clarke had solid documentation for every one of his charges. It really was a slam-dunk case.
And Bush went on to win re-election anyway. And his main strategy was the same one he’s using now: To make really vile, dishonest arguments, thereby luring the other side to respond in kind, systematically ratcheting up the level of hostility until everyone not already obsessed with politics gets disgusted and tunes out the debate.
November 17th, 2005 at 8:11 am
You’re exactly right on the Bush Admin strategy. I’m hoping, though, that people are beginning to pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
BTW my favorite Richard Clarke story was how right after 9/11, Rumsfeld said, “There aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan. Let’s bomb Iraq.”
November 19th, 2005 at 3:32 am
Only a left wing extremist could believe that GW Bush, Bill Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton made false claims about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction so that we might send in an army that would inevitably find there were no weapons of mass destruction!
FACT: “The administration’s overarching point is true: Intelligence agencies overwhelmingly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and very few members of Congress from either party were skeptical about this belief before the war began in 2003.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/11/AR2005111101832.html
In 2000 Richard Clarke claims he prepared for plane attacts into buildings.. I have a question what was his plan… harding airplane cockpits, air marshalls, or how about just banning six inch knifes from planes?
PS: When Richard Clarke’s “hair was on fire” in the summer of summer of 2001 did he tell anyone that we need to harding airplane cockpits, air marshalls, or how about just banning six inch knifes from planes?
The anwser is no….
Mr. Clarke at once criticizes Bush for passivity and aggression. He blames him for not pursuing the terrorists and then blames him for provoking them when he does. It is not clear if Clarke wants to catch terrorists or understand them.
November 21st, 2005 at 5:50 pm
trg – have you been drinking and posting again?
please come back when you are sober
bush co stole $700 million from the afghan war to start the planning and logistics moving on their iraq war, before congress OK’d the Iraq debacle (impeachable, but since there isn’t any Dimocrat semen involved you folks aren’t interested).
do you get money from Cheney/Halliburton/KBR? cuz otherwise you sound well, I dunno, insane? the intelligence was highly massaged
FACT