If you didn’t see this, you really missed out. Matthews performs an abortion on Kucinich’s already feeble candidacy:
MATTHEWS: We
John Cole started Balloon Juice early in 2002. Those who have followed along know that this has been quite the journey.
by John Cole| 29 Comments
This post is in: Humorous
If you didn’t see this, you really missed out. Matthews performs an abortion on Kucinich’s already feeble candidacy:
MATTHEWS: We
by John Cole| 5 Comments
This post is in: Foreign Affairs
A reader wrote in with a very interesting question:
“Why would anyone forge the documents?”
Why, indeed? Whowould forge them is just as good a question. That, to me, rather than whether or not the President and his staff relied on British intelligence for a line in the SOTU address, seems to be the reall issue.
by John Cole| 9 Comments
This post is in: Media
Walter Pincus concludes in today’s WaPo piece:
On March 16, Cheney appeared again on “Meet the Press” and reiterated his views of the previous August about Hussein’s nuclear program. “We know he’s been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.” The war began three days later.
Clearly Pincus does not read Spinsanity, because once again, a member of the press fails to use the quotation in the appropriate context. From Spinsanity:
Finally, a dispute has arisen over a quote from Vice President Dick Cheney, who said on the March 16 edition of NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “we believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.” To date, the assertion remains unproven, and has drawn heavy criticism in the dispute over statements made by the administration in arguing on behalf of a potential war with Iraq. However, as UCLA law professor and blogger Eugene Volokh points out in an article on National Review Online (echoing a point made by a several bloggers), commentators such as New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, Slate’s Tim Noah and Salon’s Joe Conason have neglected to point out the context of Cheney’s statement. Specifically, Cheney said four times in the same interview that Saddam was pursuing nuclear weapons, not that he already possesses them, and the phrase “reconstituted nuclear weapons” makes little sense on its own (why would Saddam give up nuclear weapons if he possessed them?). 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). Cheney’s critics may believe his statement was intentional, but they owe their readers a clearer picture of the context in which he said it, as do too many other journalists and pundits of late, it seems.
But, as the Daily Howler has pointed out, the press has made up their minds.
by John Cole| 4 Comments
This post is in: General Stupidity
If anyone has been found to be a liar regarding this whole uranium non-scandal, it is me, because I proclaimed I wasn’t going to talk about this anymore and then promptly posted 5 pieces on it. Here is one more to complete the package.
At any rate, Kevin Drum, in the comments section of this post regarding Ken Pollack’s pre-war predictions regarding the Iraqi WMD programs (and more specifically, the nuclear capabilities), states the following:
I don’t think Pollack is a liar. I think he truthfully reported the consensus of the intelligence community, which matches what Tenet said about the NIE in October. The CIA *did* think that Saddam had a large and active nuclear program.
Pollack blew it, but the real question is why the intelligence agencies blew it so badly. That story is just starting to come out.
Unfrotunately, the left does not seem willing to extend the same benefit to Bush. Regardless of the partisan shenanigans that the Donks are now engaging in (which appears to be having some serious blowback of its own), the real question is “What is wrong with our intelligence services?”
Let’s start from the top:
1.) I believe Saddam had and continued to possess weapons which placed him in material breech (including long-range missiles, chem and bio weapons, and perhaps part of a nuclear program).
2.) I can also list about 25 other reasons why I was an still am in favor of what we did in Iraq.
3.) Bush’s SOTU address with the infamous line is still not only technically accurate, but according to the Brits COMPLETELY accurate.
4.) The same people who are now in hysterics about Bush lying, even though he didn’t are the same people who all believed and agreed that Saddam had WMD. The only thing that differed was the approach to the issue. Most on the left wanted continued sanctions and inspections.
5.) No one in the House or Senate, and I mean no one, voted for the war because of the line in question. This, of course, is indisputable and undeniable. Pretending that war was not imminent after the Senate vote is merely additional evidence that Democrats and the anti-war crowd suffer from dementia.
All of that is pretty clear, and yet the Democrats are lauching into a full-fledged scandal mode, spinning their own webs of lies and deceit that are so obvious that the Daily Howler has now dedicated TWO days worth of posts pointing out the duplicity. What is going to happen because of all this?
Here are my predictions:
1.) Mucho partisan bickering at House and Senate hearings. Both parties will claim that they have been vindicated by the same testimony, not noticing the irony.
2.) Democrats, in their attempt to find something (“Please, Dear God, give us any issue to run on next year”) to attack Bush with will miss the really relevant issue, which is why are our intelligence services so f——d up? They probably won’t ask the question, because this is something that has taken a while to get to this point. God forbid they accept some accountability from their behavior during the Clinton years.
3.) Republicans, on the defensive, will blame it all on the Clintons.
4.) Tenet will survive, slightly bloodied, and Bush will remain unscathed. In fact, Bush’s numbers will probably increase (a la Clinton impeachment- the public recognizes witch hunts, and I am not sure why politicians have not figured out what clear BS detectors most people have.)
5.) Because the Democrats are in attack mode and the Republicans are in CYA mode (for no real reason), there will be NO FUNDAMENTAL CHANGES to the intelligence services. And that just really pisses me off.
by John Cole| 6 Comments
This post is in: Democratic Stupidity
It appears that I was not the only one who thought Dean’s guest blogging appearance at Lawrence Lessig’s site was less than inspirational. Richard Bennett and Greg at Begging to Differ comment.
by John Cole| 3 Comments
This post is in: Media
Although it does not rise to the level of deceit and incompetence that riddled the NY Times under Raines, the Washington Times had their own little crisis to deal with:
A letter to the editor of The Washington Times, purported to be from a senior U.S. diplomat with scathing criticism of the Foreign Service for lack of loyalty to the Bush administration, was exposed yesterday as a forgery.
Wesley Pruden, the editor in chief of The Times, said the newspaper learned “from the highest level at the State Department” that the letter was a hoax and the newspaper fully accepts “as true that the ambassador was not the author of this letter.”
Stephan M. Minikes, ambassador to the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, writes in an authentic letter to The Times, published in full this morning on Page A18, that the forgery was a “complete and utter fabrication. It was not written by or for me and it expressed views that are diametrically opposite to the views I hold.
“The fact is that never in my long career have I worked with a more dedicated group of professionals than those I have encountered in the Department of State led by Secretary Powell
by John Cole| 3 Comments
This post is in: Media
Why is the Washington Post the new ‘paper of record?’ Balance:
In the absence of evidence, there has been an extraordinary amount of attention paid to marginal issues — most recently, those 16 words in President Bush’s State of the Union speech that said, accurately, that British intelligence believed Iraq had been seeking to obtain uranium in Africa. In fact, British intelligence did believe that — and still does, even though one set of documents purporting to show an Iraqi procurement mission in Niger proved to be forgeries. Last week the White House announced that the sentence should not have been included in the speech, because the CIA knew of the Niger forgery and had not been able to confirm the broader British report. The claim was deleted from other administration statements, but some White House officials, banking on the British, apparently pressed for its inclusion in spite of the CIA’s doubts. If so, that would represent one of several instances in which administration statements on Iraq were stretched to reflect the most aggressive interpretation of the intelligence.
The piece is titled “Wait for the Facts.” Fat chance.