I would assume his point was the Bush followers supreme level of required cognitive dissonance.

As a funny side note. Either sometime in 2003 or spring of 2004, I was talking to(ok ranting at) some people at work about the right-wing and “liberal” MSM echo chamber and how amazingly clueless most of the American public are to repeatedly fall for the obvious propaganda and BS they put out for the Bush admin and GOP.

One of the guys happened to be from Bulgaria. So I asked him if unlike so many Americans, didn’t most of the people under the old Soviet Union realize that Pravda and Tass were mostly just pumping out state propaganda?

His answer, “But of course.”

No, we never saw a point to this. There are a few possibilities, none of them very meaningful:

As is the case when I bother to check their quotes, it might have turned out that they were distorting Clinton’s views to make them appear closer to Bush’s. In that case, this is irrelevant.

There likely was an overlap in views on WMD but this is not very relevant once you consider the different dates (Clinton may have been speaking before Saddam destroyed the WMD), they could have been discussing different types of WMD, and their responses were radically different. Even if they were correct in finding similarities between the statements of Bush and Clinton, this isn’t particularly meaningful.

Even if Bill Clinton agreed with George Bush 100% on WMD, and even if he backed him in going to war, this would still not be very meaningful. The war would still be wrong. The claims about WMD prior to the war would still be wrong. Bush would still have deceived Congress and the public. This was Bush’s actions, and even if he had the support of Bill Clinton this would not justify his actions.

Maybe their point was simply that Bush didn’t lie. I’d actually prefer to avoid phrasing it as a question of whether Bush lied. He left some wiggle room in many statements, but they remained misleading statements, and it doesn’t matter whether you want to call them lies or not. John Kerry leaves it as saying Bush misled the nation. The bottom line is that the Bush administration ran a sophisticated propaganda effort to mislead both Congress and the country to get us into a war under false pretenses.

If you really want to defend Bush from the charges of lying, you would have to go with the argument that his statements weren’t lies because he believed them. While farfetched, that is a possibility. Of course that means that he was incredibly misinformed, lazy about reviewing information from government agencies, and easily misled by people like Cheney. Possible, but defending him as being incometent to this degree is hardly better than admitting he is a liar.

Thanks for the heads up. Time is precious and I didn’t really want to wade through the posts above if it was going to be on the order of what I glanced at last night; re: Joe Wilson, it really wasn’t going to be worth it. (Sorry Qwinn.)

Did Qwinn ever explain what his point was? That GWB didn’t lie? Was that the end-all-be-all of his arguement?

And I see SteveMG didn’t return. Ah well. As you said, “The Soviet Union would still be around if the Russians believed Pravda as much as Republicans believe the right wing noise machine.” LOL

I fear we may have reached the end of meaningful discussion as we don’t have a common ground as to what the facts are.

For as long as I can remember the conservative media like Human Events and National Review have built a following by “revealing” information which only they seem to have which proves they are right. The situation is much worse now with more conservative publications, Fox News, and the echo chamber in the rightwing blogoshere.

They have their own alternate reality and if you accept their “facts” Bush did not lie, Saddam really had WMD and ties to al Qaeda, and Joe Wilson made everything up. Anything which contradicts this is just the dishonest liberal media.

Going up against that mind set, there is little room for discussion. The Soviet Union would still be around if the Russians believed Pravda as much as Republicans believe the right wing noise machine.

No time to post right now, but I want to apologize for seeming to ignore some of your posts around 68-70+… those were the posts that weren’t showing up at the time, and so now, my response (or more accurately lack of response) seems out of context.

I will be back. (To quote Arnold… )

It worked for quite a while, but fortunately people have been catching on to Bush in the past year.

Really? None of it’s credible hmm? Yet all these other things you supposedly debunk all the time aren’t credible either?

How come I’ve never seen a successful fisking of Michael Ledeen’s book? Or a successful dismissal of the Salman Pak terrorist training camp as a significant link? Believe me, I argue this with anti-war opponents all the time, and they’ve never come close. Fact is, most of the arguments and facts posed by the “right wing media” have been far superior to those that Bush has cited, and the “left wing media” has done a very lame job of debunking those arguments.

Okay, let me ask you this. If ChimpyBushHitler is indeed this evil nefarious criminal who would make up any scurrilous lie to back up his claims, why didn’t he just plant some WMD in Iraq and have done with the whole thing? Would that really have been all that hard? Wouldn’t it have been far simpler than going through all the loops you people think he’s guilty of?

Qwinn

LOL!

It’s interesting that the post claiming that Wilson’s claims “held up” is based almost entirely on the Bush Administration’s willingness to say “Fine, fine, we shouldn’t have included it.”

Naturally, since your starting assumption is always that Bush lies and exaggerates in favor of the war, you’re going to interpret that as “Well, if they -admit- the evidence wasn’t credible, then obviously it wasn’t.”

What I don’t think you realize is that conservatives and war supporters see it entirely opposite of the way you do. Supporters of the war are, if anything, seriously annoyed with the administration for pushing the evidence justifying the war so weakly.

There’s tons of evidence out there that the administration could have used and failed to. The Salman Pak training camp south of Baghdad – how often did Bush mention it? Not once that I know of. Dozens of eyewitness reports from high ranking members of Saddam’s regime. Basically anything from Michael Ledeen’s The Terror Masters. The administration never used any of it. It’s been, for us, infuriating.

We look at statements like the one that article claims, where the administration says they shouldn’t have included it, as their being rather spineless and basically just saying, “FINE, fine, for God’s sake, if it means that much to you, forget it, we’re sorry we ever talked about it”. It’s understandable – the amount of furor over those 16 words has been so disproportionate even if it had been debunked – and it hasn’t – that I can understand why they just want to get past it.

But to me, it just confirms that the administration bought into the liberal media demand that no evidence can be allowed to be presented unless it is “smoking gun evidence”. That’s ridiculous. A mountain of circumstantial evidence is – or at least should be – good enough for most people. There’s a ton of evidence – like the Salman Pak terrorist training camp south of Baghdad – that Bush to my knowledge never once brought up. If you honestly looked at the last couple years, and if you have discussed this extensively with war supporters – you would have noticed that a LOT of the evidence and things that war supporters, conservative columnists, etc. talk about are things that the Bush administration has never even brought up. How do you fit that in with your contention that Bush would lie and exaggerate and say anything to gin up support for the war? If he would do so, why didn’t he bring up all the things that all the other war supporters do?

Qwinn

Qwinn

The second article you posted is a perfect example of what you claimed war supporters were attempting to do to Wilson: “misquoted what he said and refuted such claims, not [Bush]’s actual accusations.”

That entire article talks about how the sale actually probably didn’t take place. WHO EVER SAID IT DID? Not Bush – Bush said that Saddam -tried- to buy uranium from Niger. All the information we have backs up that he did – and Wilson’s claim in his editorial that the administration “manipulated” that intelligence is therefore fraudulent. That Niger wasn’t willing to sell it back was never, ever in dispute. No one ever claimed otherwise. That article responds to nothing and is a pure rebuttal of a straw man argument.

Does the fact that Saddam didn’t actually succeed in buying the uranium make any significant difference? Only if “imminent threat” was your only criteria sufficient to support the war – another straw man argument. As I have pointed out, those who supported the war didn’t need an “imminent threat” to believe Saddam needed to be taken out. The fact that he was actively attempting to get uranium, successfully or not, demonstrates that he was pursuing a nuclear program in violation of every agreement and 17 UN resolutions. That’s enough for me to consider him an unacceptable threat – how can that not be enough for you?

Qwinn

Also keep in mind that a lot more information became public after your article was written, further showing the validity of Wilson’s charges. For example:

FOREIGN DESK

2002 Memo Doubted Uranium Sale Claim
By ERIC LICHTBLAU (NYT) 1068 words
Published: January 18, 2006

WASHINGTON, Jan. 17 – A high-level intelligence assessment by the Bush administration concluded in early 2002 that the sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq was ”unlikely” because of a host of economic, diplomatic and logistical obstacles, according to a secret memo that was recently declassified by the State Department.

Among other problems that made such a sale improbable, the assessment by the State Department’s intelligence analysts concluded, was that it would have required Niger to send ”25 hard-to-conceal 10-ton tractor-trailers” filled with uranium across 1,000 miles and at least one international border.

The analysts’ doubts were registered nearly a year before President Bush, in what became known as the infamous ”16 words” in his 2003 State of the Union address, said that Saddam Hussein had sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

The White House later acknowledged that the charge, which played a part in the decision to invade Iraq in the belief that Baghdad was reconstituting its nuclear program, relied on faulty intelligence and should not have been included in the speech. Two months ago, Italian intelligence officials concluded that a set of documents at the center of the supposed Iraq-Niger link had been forged by an occasional Italian spy.

A handful of news reports, along with the Robb-Silberman report last year on intelligence failures in Iraq, have previously made reference to the early doubts expressed by the State Department’s bureau of intelligence and research in 2002 concerning the reliability of the Iraq-Niger uranium link.

But the intelligence assessment itself — including the analysts’ full arguments in raising wide-ranging doubts about the credence of the uranium claim — was only recently declassified as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group that has sought access to government documents on terrorism and intelligence matters. The group, which received a copy of the 2002 memo among several hundred pages of other documents, provided a copy of the memo to The New York Times.

The White House declined to discuss details of the declassified memo, saying the Niger question had already been explored at length since the president’s State of the Union address.

”This matter was examined fully by the bipartisan Silberman-Robb commission, and the president acted on their broad recommendations to reform our intelligence apparatus,” said Frederick Jones, a spokesman for the National Security Council.

The public release of the State Department assessment, with some sections blacked out, adds another level of detail to an episode that was central not only to the debate over the invasion of Iraq, but also in the perjury indictment of I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

In early 2002, the Central Intelligence Agency sent the former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV to Niger to investigate possible attempts to sell uranium to Iraq. The next year, after Mr. Wilson became a vocal critic of the Bush administration’s Iraqi intelligence, the identity of his wife, Valerie Wilson, a C.I.A. officer who suggested him for the Niger trip, was made public. The investigation into the leak led to criminal charges in October against Mr. Libby, who is accused of misleading investigators and a grand jury.

The review by the State Department’s intelligence bureau was one of a number of reviews undertaken in early 2002 at the State Department in response to secret intelligence pointing to the possibility that Iraq was seeking to buy yellowcake, a processed uranium ore, from Niger to reconstitute its nuclear program.

A four-star general, Carlton W. Fulford Jr., was also sent to Niger to investigate the claims of a uranium purchase. He, too, came away with doubts about the reliability of the report and believed Niger’s yellowcake supply to be secure. But the State Department’s review, which looked at the political, economic and logistical factors in such a purchase, seems to have produced wider-ranging doubts than other reviews about the likelihood that Niger would try to sell uranium to Baghdad.

The review concluded that Niger was ”probably not planning to sell uranium to Iraq,” in part because France controlled the uranium industry in the country and could block such a sale. It also cast doubt on an intelligence report indicating that Niger’s president, Mamadou Tandja, might have negotiated a sales agreement with Iraq in 2000. Mr. Tandja and his government were reluctant to do anything to endanger their foreign aid from the United States and other allies, the review concluded. The State Department review also cast doubt on the logistics of Niger being able to deliver 500 tons of uranium even if the sale were attempted. ”Moving such a quantity secretly over such a distance would be very difficult, particularly because the French would be indisposed to approve or cloak this arrangement,” the review said.

Chris Farrell, the director of investigations at Judicial Watch and a former military intelligence officer, said he found the State Department’s analysis to be ”a very strong, well-thought-out argument that looks at the whole playing field in Niger, and it makes a compelling case for why the uranium sale was so unlikely.”

The memo, dated March 4, 2002, was distributed at senior levels by the office of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and by the Defense Intelligence Agency.

A Bush administration official, who requested anonymity because the issue involved partly classified documents, would not say whether President Bush had seen the State Department’s memo before his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, 2003.

But the official added: ”The White House is not an intelligence-gathering operation. The president based his remarks in the State of the Union address on the intelligence that was presented to him by the intelligence community and cleared by the intelligence community. The president has said the intelligence was wrong, and we have reorganized our intelligence agencies so we can do better in the future.”

Mr. Wilson said in an interview that he did not remember ever seeing the memo but that its analysis should raise further questions about why the White House remained convinced for so long that Iraq was trying to buy uranium in Africa.

”All the people understood that there was documentary evidence” suggesting that the intelligence about the sale was faulty, he said.

There was a time I doubted him in the face of articles such as the one you posted, but as the full story ultimately came out he was vindicated.