Have you ever wondered why memes never die? Because so-called respectable journalists regurgitate them when they have nothing else to back up their argument. Here is Big Media Matt Yglesias re-spinning the tale that the Clinton Administration passed on to the Bush White House a plan to fight Al Qaeda:
Nevertheless, because Lowry wants to play the culpability game, let me suggest that an accusation of weakness on terrorism can be more plausibly pointed at the pre-9-11 Bush administration than at Clinton’s. By all indications, Bush, upon entering office, actually reduced the priority given to fighting terrorism from a level that was, in retrospect, already inadequate. According to Time, Clinton officials developed, in the waning days of their administration, a plan for combating al-Qaeda more vigorously, but — wanting to avoid sticking the incoming administration with a policy it had not designed — they delayed implementing the plan and instead passed the matter on to the incoming national-security team. Bush’s aides didn’t get around to discussing these anti-terrorism efforts at the highest levels until September 2001.
Do we really have to go through this again? First, just to get this out of my system: Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire. Here is Newsmax on Clinton himself pulling the plug on any such plans, and since you wingnuts never trust Fox or Newsmax or anything to the right of NPR, here is the Daily Howler with the relevant Sandy Berger Quote (and if you don’t know who Berger is, quit arguing with me:
BERGER: Now, the second question you asked
HH
The big problem is that Time magazine, to my knowledge, never bothered to address Berger’s testimony. I’ve never even seen them say “we stand by our story” when clearly Berger blew it out of the water here, in testimony no less.
Steve
Tell me about it. There are two memes that drive up the wall. The first is that Clinton ended that previous recession. I hear this from dimwitted Democrats all the freaking time. Oh yes, they are dimwitted. So stupid they probably should have their feeding tubes removed. I mean in one breath they’ll tell me about he 10 years of expansion in the economy. Now…the Bush II recession started in March of 2001, now go back exactly 10 years and you get? March of 1993 apparently.
Second, lets not even mention the fact that Clinton was only President for 8 years not 10.
See how stupid these people are? Not convinced? Well here is the next one. Unemployment only went down after Clinton became President. Sorry wrong $@#^ing answer morons. A quick perusal of the FREE (okay its technically not free in that taxes pay for it, but its super freaking easy to get) data from BLS tells a very, very different story.
Yet, Democrats/Lefties all over the place believe the two memes above like they were handed to Moses by God himself.
bg
I think you conveniently fail to address the first sentance of the second paragraph:
“Number one among those [concerns] was terrorism and Al Qaida.”
So, according to Berger there wasn’t a plan, but according to Lowry, there was nothing – not even a realization of Al Qaida’s danger.
Assuming Berger is being honest (not that anyone’s saying otherwise), who’s lie is closer to the truth? Yglesias or Lowry?
File under: Cole’s frothing rant
Kimmitt
I was about to say — even if the Clinton Administration did not hand over a fully-realized plan to the Bushies, they most certainly did hand over a lot of very important information that they obviously expected the incoming Administration to do something with. Bush’s response to this was to cut the FBI’s counterterrorism budget.
I’ve finally figured out why this site views Democrats as greater liars than Republicans — you equate someone who trusts a Time article which got a big detail wrong to (for example) falsely stating that Saddam had nuclear weapons on Meet the Press. I’m all for holding Dems to a higher standard — I certainly do — but I feel that you should acknowledge that your accusations of mendacity are based on your greater expectations.
Robin Roberts
Ah, and Kimmitt lives up to the meme of invention by claiming that “…falsely stating that Saddam had nuclear weapons on Meet the Press”.
Obviously a reference to Dick Cheney’s interview where the context is clear that Cheney is refering to nuclear weapons programs.
Good job proving the point, Kimmitt, that you share the dishonesty.
Inigo Montoya
“The terrorism briefing was delivered by Richard Clarke, a career bureaucrat who had served in the first Bush Administration and risen during the Clinton years to become the White House’s point man on terrorism. As chair of the interagency Counter-Terrorism Security Group (CSG), Clarke was known as a bit of an obsessive-just the sort of person you want in a job of that kind. Since the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000-an attack that left 17 Americans dead-he had been working on an aggressive plan to take the fight to al-Qaeda. The result was a strategy paper that he had presented to Berger and the other national security “principals” on Dec. 20. But Berger and the principals decided to shelve the plan and let the next Administration take it up. With less than a month left in office, they did not think it appropriate to launch a major initiative against Osama bin Laden. “We would be handing (the Bush Administration) a war when they took office on Jan. 20,” says a former senior Clinton aide. “That wasn’t going to happen.”
Jesus Cole, bother to read your own sources.
Kimmitt
“And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. ElBaradei, frankly, is wrong.”
source
HH
Once again, Berger says the reporting you refer to is inaccurate and he said it in testimony. Clarke has also said his suggestion to do anything in response to the Cole was meant with nothing but disapproval. Hardly the picture Yglesias wants to paint.
As for the out-of-context Cheney quote, go here…
Dixie Flatline
Kimmitt, perhaps you don’t understand the definition of context. How many times in that interview does Cheney say “reconstituted nuclear weapons programs”? Care to count? Care to stop being (1) willfully ignorant and/or (2) intellectually dishonest?
There are plenty of valid criticisms of Bush’s handling of the war (on “terror” generally and against Iraq) – try focusing on those rather than trotting out the same tired lies.
Kimmitt
That explanation would make more sense to me had Vice President Cheney taken any pains to correct his misstatement in the intervening six months.
The context is interesting — Cheney states that Saddam had restarted his nuclear weapons program and that he had acquired the tools and materials necessary to construct a nuclear bomb, but then stops short of saying that he had created a bomb until that last sentence. You want my opinion? Cheney let the sentence sit, because it did what it was supposed to do — create a false sense of urgency — then allowed him to regain his credibility after the war had already started.
Dixie Flatline
I trust then that you can point us to the blaring newspaper headlines: “CHENEY: SADDAM HAS NUKES” and stories that began “The risks involved with a potential U.S.-led invasion of Iraq skyrocketed Sunday, when Vice President Dick Cheney claimed the Iraqi leader was in possession of a nuclear bomb”?
But of course, you can’t, because it was obvious at the time (as it is now) that Cheney misspoke. Perhaps he didn’t feel the need to correct his misstatment, because no one believed he claimed Saddam had nukes. It’s only now, when the left is unable or unwilling to address the substantive faults in Bush’s war strategy (e.g., failing to confront the Saudis, failing to control the borders, failing to take airport security seriously, etc) that they (and you) have turned to absurd claims that Cheney was running around claiming Saddam had a nuclear bomb. You can convince people with reasoned arguments, but not with BS like this.
Dodd
Kimmitt – you are either a) an idiot or b) a hate-driven partisan hack who has allowed his agenda to blind him to even the most obvious kinds of nonsense. Cheney was speaking, off the cuff, for a solid hour. One time in that hour – one time! – he mis-spoke that phrase (one that does not exactly roll off the tongue) out of several times he used it. Could you do any better? No, you couldn’t. None of us could. He didn’t just “let the sentence sit.” He didn’t retract it because there was nothing to retract – to anyone not either a) a moron or b) ideologically committed to purposefully misunderstanding it, the meaning of his remarks was perfectly clear.
Mr. Cole, Kimmitt is a perfect example of my usual answer to questions like the one in the title of this post: 80% of questions that begin with the word ‘why’ can be adequately answered, ‘Because people are stupid.’
Kimmitt
If I misspoke and said that someone had nukes when they didn’t, I’d put out a quick press release the next day to clear things up. Just saying.
Dean
Kimmitt:
You have regularly and repeatedly been told that Cheney did not say that the Iraqis reconstituted nuclear weapons.
You have regularly and repeatedly been told that there is NO EVIDENCE that Bush ever said the threat was imminent.
You continue to say the meme, in a thread on liberal memes.
I wonder what retraction might ever come from you?
But not very hard. Life’s too short.
Kimmitt
Bush said, very clearly, that the threat from Iraq was not imminent in the State of the Union Address.
He then went on to say that it is difficult to impossible to know whether or not a threat is imminent in today’s world — that it is impossible to act when a threat is imminent, because we will get no warning.
Bush said that the threat from Iraq was not imminent. He also said that we could wake up tomorrow having suffered a massive terrorist attack based from Iraq. Reasonable people drew their own conclusions.
Joe Schmoe
Kimmitt, that’s so true.
After hearing Bush’s speech, I was convinced — convinced! — that Iraq was about to attack us with chemical, biological, and reconstituted nuclear weapons.
“Honey, take the kids and go to the basement,” I said as I grabbed my shotgun and loaded it with double-ought buckshot, determined to defend our home from the Iraqi invaders.
That night, Los Angles was abuzz with rumours. Someone said that an Iraqi carrier group had been sighted just off the Santa Monica pier. Every time we heard a plane fly overhead (we couldn’t actually see them on account of the smog), we wondered whether it was a nuclear-tipped Scud on its way to downtown LA.
One of our neighbors said that there was a secret Iraqi redoubt in the Angeles National Forest. The government hushed this up becuase they didn’t want to start a panic. As Fox News showed American tanks in Baghdad, I wondered whether Iraqi tanks might soon be on the streets of Alhambra, California, where I live.
Imagine my shock when I discovered that there never was an imminent Iraqi threat upon reading several lefty blogs.
Bush lied to me! An entire city — nay, an entire country — was gripped by the paralysis by fear after hearing the State of the Union speech.
This must never happen again. Democracy depends on electing truthful leaders who are honest with the citizentry so that the citizentry may make its own decisions.
That’s why I am throwing Bush out of office and casting my vote for Dean/Kucinich in 2004!
Robert Crawford
Perhaps Kimmit should read the sources he cites:
MR. RUSSERT: Reconstituted nuclear weapons. You misspoke.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Yeah. I did misspeak. I said repeatedly during the show weapons capability. We never had any evidence that he had acquired a nuclear weapon.
Kinda sad when the source you cite refutes your claim on the VERY NEXT LINE.
Robin Roberts
You are incorrect, Robert, it is not sad. It is merely further proof of Kimmitt’s inate dishonesty.
Good job Kimmitt on further establishing your utter lack of credibility and intentional lying.
Dodd
Reasonable people drew their own conclusions.
Yes, Kimmitt, they did. Everyone not in the class “reasonable people” drew the conclusion you did. Or, should I say, “drew the conclusion you read on some leftie site that didn’t bother to post the whole transcript and have mindlessly repeated without ever checking it out for yourself”?
Even if he hadn’t corrected himself immediately (and thanks to Robert for digging that out, since, obviously, the sources where Kimmitt gets his information never would have), “reconstituted nuclear weapons” doesn’t even *mean* anything. It’s an obvious mis-statement.
Since you’re so anxious for others to do it, we wil await *your* retraction with baited breath.
Kimmitt
“That explanation would make more sense to me had Vice President Cheney taken any pains to correct his misstatement in the intervening six months.”
C’mon, you’re used to spending half an hour parsing Bush’s sentences; do me the favor of actually reading mine.
HH
His staff corrected the record before Cheney did on Meet the Press. And again, anyone with the reading and listening skills of a nine-year-old didn’t believe that Cheney was saying Saddam had nukes, as long as they weren’t getting an out-of-context quote.
Not Kimmit
Hey, retraction hell. We don’t need to retract anything, mainly because we (lefties and liberals that is) are better than you. When your president revives the economy and apologizes for starting an unnecessary war, we’ll think about a retraction. Until then, suck it.
Dixie Flatline
Hey Joe, I posted your comment over at my site, and I hope you don’t mind. If you do, let me know and I’ll pull it.
Kevin
Hey Not Kimmit
The economy is reviving and the war was neccessary. If you actually take a longer view of events than 15 minutes from now, you will be able to see why the Iraq war was needed and the right thing to do, draim the swamp.
obruni
Thank you for setting the record straight by letting us know that Clinton was still president on 9/11/01. Bush certainly had a mess to clean up when he assumed office on 9/12/01.
Too bad that Clinton is still running the economy. When is Bush going to take over and bring back prosperity?
David Perron
Well, that post has got to go up for the stupid post of the week award.
Kimmitt
>His staff corrected the record before Cheney did on Meet the Press.
Could I get a cite, please? This would be relevant to me.
Andrew Lazarus
The meme that bothers me is the false claim that Al Gore said he created the Internet. He was unfairly ridiculed for that. I thought that’s what the thread was about.
[Aside to my buddy Kimmitt: I’m willing to give Cheney a pass on the misspoke question. Today we learned that Saddam didn’t reconstitute his *program* either! He was left with nothing but impotent nuclear desires.]
Joe Schmoe is being an ass. I’m glad he knew that the many referenes to “mushroom clouds” were deceptive prolefeed for Operation Halliburton Profit (a/k/a Operation Confuse the Democratic Party), but some fools took them seriously. Schmoe was clued in: Iraq was no threat to us whatsoever. Funny, he and I agree on that!
And Dean, the “No imminent threat” side didn’t do too well here. I guess it was the extensive catalogs of terrifying threats, coupled with the Administration’s post-9/11 decision that “imminent” didn’t mean what it used to.
Justin Katz
Y’know, most of these memes are getting just plain old. And I’m starting to think that the libs keep repeating them because they sense that reasonable people will eventually throw up their hands and say, “Whatever. We’re too busy actually making the future a safer place to be.”
I’m beginning to suspect that it’s really all about anti-war folks finding a way not to feel like dirt about the fact that they argued against removing a man who had thugs ripping out the eyes of infants to make Daddy lie more convincingly. The reason this suspicion seems valid is that these arguments always come back around to their talking points prewar: “Well, if it wasn’t ‘imminent,’ then it must have been a war of aggression! Huh? What child prisons and torture factories? Mr. Cheney misspoke on Meet the Press!”
And, hey, as Andrew Lazarus points out, the NSC used the word “imminent” on page 15 (ish)! Of course, if one reads further, it becomes clear that this is a general strategy paper (as the title declares), saying, “The United States will not use force in all cases to preempt emerging threats, nor should nations use preemption as a pretext for aggression.”
As for Kimmitt, his source is from Meet the Press on September 14, 2003 (as in, last month). The context before and after the quotation makes it clear that we’re talking programs. AND there’s a big ol’ disclaimer at the top of the page that says, “This is a rush transcript provided for the information and convenience of the press. Accuracy is not guaranteed.”
The bottom line is that the anti-Bush folks didn’t buy the pre-emptive argument before the war, and now they’re trying to cycle back to their antebellum arguments with a “Bush lied” turnaround, hoping that this time — maybe this time — they’ll be able to fool a few more people into believing that we really can just stick our heads back in the sand and pretend 9/11 never happened, and maybe even fool themselves into believing that there was a way to oppose the war without supporting a monster who would have — and very well may have — assisted in attacks against our nation.
Andrew Lazarus
Justin, you’re just being f—ing stupid. We liberals all knew that Saddam was a nasty tryant. So is Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan and we count him as one of our ALLIES. Believe me, we didn’t go into Iraq to save Iraqis, or we’d be in the Congo, Uzbekistan, and Burma right now. Maybe what drives us nuts is listening to fools say patently incredible, obviously inadequate explanations who think they are being clever.
Since I guess you are quietly conceding that the WMD argument was crap, I’ll tell you flat out: No, removing Saddam Hussein was NOT worth insulting out allies with falsified intel (and implying they were cowards for not playing along), not worth creating new and highly dubious standards for preemptive wars of choice, not worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and not worth the upcoming eight to ten years occupation with our soldiers dying every day.
There are some other severe logic problems in your post. First,
This says that even in case of emerging threats, it may not be necessary to use force. We did use force. Therefore the threat was worse than emerging—imminent perhaps? You’ve got your reasoning exactly backwards.
And, once more with feeling, SADDAM HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH 9/11. Invading Iraq to show we’ve learned something from 9/11 makes as much sense as invading Peronist Argentina after Pearl Harbor. Face it, for some variety of weak, misstated, and even fake reasons, we diverted ourselves from the fight against Al Qaeda to, at great cost to ourselves (including rupturing our alliances), deal with a third-rate dictator who was no threat to our personal security. I don’t know why you are so proud of this blunder. Actually, the conservative view seems to be if we all pretend to be proud of this blunder, it will turn into a good idea. (See under: Emperor, new clothes of)
Justin Katz
Andrew,
I’ll have to check back for your reaction after Bush wins the next election because none of the Dems can be trusted to protect our country, and the economy will have come back enough that all of the efforts of the major media will be insufficient to convince people that they’re hurting financially. Your litany offers the perfect example of the first reason.
First of all, I did not concede “that the WMD argument was crap.” I merely suggested that “the WMD argument” was never what libs are now saying that it was. Yet, it was still adequate, in my opinion. We’ll differ, here, but that’s the point: you’re still arguing the pre-war debate. Move on, bub. You and yours are placing a whole lot of your weight on the branch of American failure (but that’s only relatively new).
As for the quotation from that NSC report (and really, how wonderful that there are Web sites out there aggregating all of these hard-to-find, buried-in-reports one-liners for easy reference), the central point was that a general strategy report isn’t exactly a propaganda piece to incite national hysteria. Moreover, the report does not say “even in case of emerging threats” we would not use force; it says that we “will not use force in all cases.” How strongly we have to act to suppress an emerging threat does not necessarily bear on how “emerged” it is. You may think my logic is backwards, but at least A connects to B (or B to A, from your perspective); I’m not relying entirely on an incorrect paraphrase, as you are.
That relates to the facile argument that if the humanitarian justification for the war had been sincere, we’d be trotting around the world toppling regimes. Different strategies will be necessary in different parts of the world. We’ve also got differing degrees of responsibility for various parts of the world. As it happens, for various reasons, including the Cold War, our fingers have been in the Middle East more heavily than they have elsewhere. It also happens to be true that a disproportionate amount of recent international trouble in the world has come from the Middle East. But I’ll look forward to your support when the immediacy of the war on terror has passed and we can devote our attention to utilizing political, economic, and sometimes military means to make the world a happier place.
And since you’ve got such zest, why not give me a single piece of evidence for this: “SADDAM HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH 9/11.” Or is this just consistent with the glib lib belief that repetition and enthusiasm can cause unknown quantities to solidify into resolved matters?
Andrew Lazarus
Justin:
1. It’s very difficult to know what evidence that Saddam was NOT involved in 9/11 would look like, although the mutual dislike of Saddam and Osama is a start. Let me know what such evidence would be, and I’ll see if I can supply it. It’s a little like my demanding evidence that your mother didn’t cheat on your father last year. I know what evidence that she DID would be, but (assuming for this hypothetical that your parents are married, alive, and in reasonable health) I can’t imagine how you could make a blanket disproof.
1A. For this reason, and given the gravity of the charge, it would seem that the burden of proof is on you. And once Pres. Bush was finally forced to answer the question directly, he had to admit that no, we had no evidence of Saddamite involvement in 9/11. None. Yeah, someone in Czechia is still going on about Atta in Prague, even though the FBI is unusually sure of its claim they know Atta was in the USA the day in question. That’s pretty weak, and given our access to Iraqi officials and documents, it’s safe to say no evidence is forthcoming from Baghdad.
2. It’s odd that you don’t think you can trust the party that gathered more votes in the last presidential election to protect its own country. I guess you’re the Mad Magazine definition of a “superpatriot”: he loves his country but hates all the people in it. Except you only hate half. In any event, let’s hear your explanation of what the pre-war WMD argument was, and we’ll compare it to what Bush and his Administration said. But we are talking past each other, because I think you are forced to concede that Iraq had no weaponry capable of injuring the United States. Hence, whatever positive the Iraq War is doing for American security is taking place on some metaphysical plane, basically along Gen Boykin’s charming line that we were showing our God was bigger than their God. (Showing, also, that our Christian Soldiers know VERY LITTLE about theology; it’s the same God….) I admit that to me, these arguments, in the face of guerrilla attacks on our forces that seem even to intensify, seem irrelevant, almost in a foreign language.
3. My point on imminent threat was not about national hysteria, because the report in question came out one week after the WTC. We had all the (justified) fear we needed then, and in particular the Iraq War (in contrast to the 100% justified anti-Taliban War) wasn’t on any horizon outside the Bush Administration. My point is that you and the Administration seek to equivocate on the question of imminence: arguing (probably correctly) that with terrorists it must be viewed more broadly, but then somehow denying that the terrifying allegations that Saddam could deliver WMD on 45 minutes’ notice and was one year away from nuclear weapons did not constitute a description of Saddam as an imminent threat (whether or not he was specificially labelled as such). Indeed, the Administration used phrases like gathering threat, and in my view gathering threat is to imminent threat as a blow job is to sex: the Clinton precedent says Bush meant imminent.
4. As far as the human rights issue, I doubt if the Liberian, Sierra Leone, Burma, Uzbek, and Congo armies are that much more formidable than the Iraqi Army. The excuse that in different parts of the world we will use different means, well, what exactly made us use military force in Iraq? You beg the question. It wasn’t just the torture chambers. Was it the oil? Was it the amazing con job of Ahmed Chalabi that he could create a democratic, pro-US, pro-Israel [!] Iraq if only we would let him? Was it the fact that Saddam and Osama share (nominally) a common religion and a common language, so it would be easy to conflate a war against one with a war against the other? Perhaps all three, but in the end, body bags are coming home for no truly valid reason at all.
5. By the way, were the Republicans who demanded (and got) hearings into how we messed up at Pearl Harbor, which were held during the war, also weaklings who couldn’t be trusted with America’s security? Cynical minds want to know why your team’s pre-war screw-ups are suddenly off limits to serious inquiry. Patriotism truly is the last refuge of scoundrels.
Dean
C’mon Andrew. It’s one thing to argue that proving a negative is very, very difficult, if not impossible. THAT, I’ll buy.
But this “Osama and Saddam were hostile w/ each other” line, puh-leeze. History is RIFE w/ examples of leaders who didn’t like, even loathed, each other, but still cooperated.
Hitler and Stalin clearly hated each other’s guts, yet the Soviet Union helped train the early Wehrmacht, and the two signed the Russo-German Non-Aggression Pact (1939).
Stalin and Churchill couldn’t stand each other, but once Hitler had invaded the USSR, Churchill made the observation that if Hitler were to invade Hell, he’d have to put in a good word for the Devil in the House of Commons.
Mao Zedong was no lover of the United States, but in order to balance against the USSR, he was more than happy to welcome Nixon to China (another example of people who hate each other cooperating), and cooperate to balance against Moscow.
So, if you’re going to argue that Osama and Saddam didn’t cooperate, simply parroting the line that they didn’t like each other is about as useful as claiming that Saddam actively cooperated in 9-11.
Kimmitt
Again, please provide a cite for the statement that Cheney’s staff corrected his “misstatement” before his appearance of Meet the Press.
Justin Katz
Andrew,
1. Well, I have no evidence that you’re not a driveling idiot who prefers to ad hominem extending even beyond the disputant. As for your points, so to speak:
1A. I’ll accept the burden in an even conversation, but you’re the one who asserted positively, and in all caps, that there was no link. I’d like some evidence of that non-existence of which you are so confident.
2. Oh c’mon. Now you’re heading into loonyville. The nation hadn’t been attacked before the last presidential election. Moreover, I was suggesting that the next presidential election won’t be so close, for the reasons I listed, a point to which your rebuttal is about as valid as a Nation of Wal-Mart greencard.
3. Oy. Nevermind the WMD argument. It’s premature to make full assertions, and you’ve obviously pre-not-accepted the arguments that I would make. If you’re interested, I’ve blogged too much on this, already. Here, for one.
4. Beg the question? Huh? For one thing, we might as well take out the tyrants who are a threat to us, as well, first.
5. This is disconnected from the issue at hand. Hearings are just fine. Hysteria and all-out President-hatred leading to slanted coverage, false assertions, and ridiculously repeated memes is another thing altogether. (By the way, I’m not particularly concerned with the state of “my” party decades ago. Those pols aren’t leading me anymore.)
HH
From the above linked Spinsanity post: “Volokh argues that Cheney likely misspoke and that he meant to say ‘reconstituted nuclear weapons programs’ or something similar, which is exactly what his aides told the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank (see his May 20 White House Notebook column).”
Kimmitt
Here’s the article Spinsanity links to; the relevant text is, “aides later said Cheney was referring to Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Weapons programs, not weapons.” At that point, I’m stuck; how do I follow up an “aides later said” assertion?
Kimmitt
That is, was the sum total of Dick Cheney’s attempt to keep the record clear an aide’s quiet response to a reporter’s direct question a month or two later? What I’m saying is this: Cheney may or may not have intended to misspeak regarding Saddam’s nuclear weapons capacity (let’s put aside for the moment the fact that he was obviously lying (or deep in self-delusion) about Saddam’s nuclear weapons programs). But it was a useful misstatement, and it was allowed to persist without followup until after the war had already begun, and any admission of techical error would not have derailed the policy desired.
In other words, he may not have meant to lie, but he was okay with declining to clear up the facts of the matter until such time as the statement’s usefulness to him had concluded. That’s how these people work.
Kimmitt
And, finally, had a Democrat engaged in this sort of sophistry, I feel quite confident that the blood pressure of this weblog’s owner would reach unhealthy levels. Dems are held to higher standards — which is, of course, fine.
Andrew Lazarus
Justin, (1) how much longer are you willing to wait for WMD evidence before giving up? Years? And I didn’t mean to make an ad hominem attack; I just needed an example of how absurd and illogical your demand for negative proof is. It is YOU who resorts to ad hominem attach (“idiot”). Maybe you couldn’t find a refutation; I don’t blame you… (4) You’re still in a circular argument. How was Saddam a threat to us? No WMD, no delivery system capable if reaching us, etc.? In fact, you’re still in the truly bizarre situation of arguing that (a) Saddam was a threat to us, such a great threat as warranted a WAR and (b) Bush never said Saddam was an imminent threat and this is a creation of lying, desperate liberals. Do you have any sense how funny these two claims look like together?
Nothing else requires further comment, except, I suppose, to repeat that I 101% supported the anti-Taliban War, which was a necessary, appropriate, and intelligent response to the attack on the United States. The Iraq War was less relevant to that attack than an invasion of Saudi Arabia or Pakistan would have been; more like an invasion of Bolivia. And instead of continuing to dismantle Al Qaeda, we’ve walked into a mess. (If this be success, not the start of a quagmire, would you tell me what a quagmire would look like?)
[Aside to Kimmitt: I think we have better arguments than covering Cheney’s lapsis linguae. Just as a quickly, we could review Cheney’s totally bogus juxtapositions of Saddam and 9/11, which finally got smacked down even by his own boss.]
Justin Katz
I’m ultra-busy today, so this will likely be it for me.
I sank below the level of discourse that I prefer to transcend, and for that I apologize. But arguing with the anti-war, anti-Bush crowd is getting to be like pushing a boulder up a hill that isn’t really there.
How long am I willing to wait for WMD evidence? Personally, Kay’s already unearthing enough vis-a-vis programs and destroyed evidence for me (as the link I made above will illustrate). Frankly, I’ve supported the removal of Hussein for better than a decade, for ever-improving reasons. But for actual weapons, I’d say at least until the team has gone through all of the 130 weapons depots is required before it’s reasonable to declare the search a failure.
Ultimately, as I began this whole thing saying, I don’t have the time or the will to continually regurgitate the argument that I and others have already made countless times. Saddam was a perennial threat, and it was just a matter of time until that threat materialized as mass murder. The argument was, and has always been, that we couldn’t wait for the threat to become imminent, mostly because we wouldn’t know when that point had been reached until it was too late. If you don’t get this, then I’m at a loss as to how to convince you.
It simply isn’t possible to have nuanced discussions with somebody who considers anything less than instant and bloodless victory to be a “quagmire.” The first prerequisite for use of such a word would be that we not be making progress, and we are making progress, as everybody attests who has gone to Iraq and returned expressing shock at the slanted news coverage.
You’re believing everything you’re told, as your aside to Kimmitt illustrates. Bush did not “smack down” Cheney. He restated almost exactly what Cheney had said; at best, he clarified the point.
Anyway, to leave it on a positive note, I’m glad that you and I are united in the desire to invade Saudi Arabia and take out those royal sons o’ bitches. Join me in writing your congressman! And be sure to vote for the Democrat who would take the fight to Riyadh…
Been fun.
Robin Roberts
Kimmitt, what you’ve done is show quite clearly that it is yourself that has no interest in honest dialogue as you cling pathetically to a long-discredited and intentional misrepresentation of Cheney’s Meet the Press appearance.
Dodd
Kimmitt: Your desperation to create a lie out of nothing is really quite pathetic. You need to let it go. One (blatantly obvious) mis-statement of a phrase he said several times is all it was. It’s highly doubtful he even realized he’d done it until later, otherwise he’d have restated it immediately to keep it in line with his previous uses of the notion – and to make it make sense, since, as has already been pointed out to you , “reconstituted nuclear weapons” doesn’t mean anything. Then, given multiple sources that state unequivocally that his staff corrected the record, you still want to hang onto your little fantasy and are now constructing even higher hurdles for Cheney to jump over.
Had that concept only appeared once in the interview, your crackpot assertion that he wanted to plant that phrase *might* have some small basis in reasonableness. But, as you know perfectly well, he was speaking off the cuff (for an hour) and bobbled that phrase one time out of several he used it, nothing more. An earthworm would have sufficient sense to realize it was just a mistake, not some devious plan to, um, well insert a highly dubious assertion into the transcript of a show only political junkies watch that would probably not become common knowledge but would almost assuredly become a constant point of paryisan carping once it had been discovered by the opposition (which is exactly what happened). That’s not partisanship, it’s Occam’s Razor.