WOOT!

I wonder how badly that 27 year CIA veteran is going to be smeared in the next few days.

1. Will the media consider this newsworthy enough to pick up? Or will they consider this "old news" and ignore it?

2. Did Rummy know that he was talking to a CIA veteran? Otherwise, I wonder why he didn't fall back on the excuse that the Bush Administration had been using. That is, blame everything on supposedly being misinformed by the country's intelligence agencies. (Or is the problem there that this defense requires him to admit that he did, in fact, say something which was untrue?)

Seriously, I gotta find out if I can send this guy some money.

His shameful jibes at the White House Correspondents' Dinner has encouraged every kook in the Reality Based Community to question the truthiness of our war leaders.

How will it end?

When a Republican president and members of his cabinet all conspire to lie in order to bring about an expensive war -- well, heck, that's just, you know, um, well, gee, why are you asking all these questions? You must really hate America! You're letting the terrorists win! Hard work! 9/11!

That brings back memories. I was watching a Fox News in an airport lobby a few days before the war began when the reporter suddenly donned a gas mask. The crowd around me stiffened and stood in rapt attention. I laughed involuntarily, and most of them spun around and glared at me like I had stepped on a duck. It was an eerie feeling... dystopian, even.

Thank Jeebus that's mostly receeded, but after listening to my cubicle neighbor laughing hysterically over Zarqawi's funniest home video and reading this yo yo, I had a flashback.

The unintentionally comic elements of this footage does not, of course, minimize the lethal threat Zarqawi and his minions pose to the Iraqi people, but it does humanize him and diffuse a bit of the mythology surrounding him. He is not invincible, and at moments, he is all but helpless.

Well, he wasn't lying, was he? If you go in all of those directions for long enough you will eventually run across a WMD. Might not be in Iraq...or on Earth...but it all depends on your definition of "somewhat."

The intent was fairly obviously mendacious, but you can't fault the statement itself. :)

And you thought there was mere popularity-hoovering behind the program to put troo -- I mean, people on Mars.

That's still wrong, but it takes more work to refute.

Wait for Part 2, where they define "area around" and "somewhat" to mean "pretty much anywhere the planet".

We've had some amazing excuses for those claims about non-existent WMD in Britain. "Intelligence was wrong but it doesn't matter because we did the right thing, and if we exaggerated it so what, it still doesn't matter because we did the right thing, and anyway we didn't exaggerate it, well, we didn't exaggerate deliberately, and if we did it doesn't matter because we did the right thing. And July 7 proves it, so there. And God will judge me."

To which my response was, well, maybe God will judge you, Tony, but we'll get a chance long before that...

The stupidest thing is, Blair seems untouchable on Iraq. I don't understand it. Journalists can get at Blair on the health service, on John Prescott's love life, and Charles Clarke's incompetence, but they can't make a difference over Iraq.

Incidentally, Geoff Hoon (defence minister in 2003) is supposedly going to be promoted today, in a reshuffle Blair hopes will restore some standing in the opinion polls.

Most people I met before the war didn't believe the WMD claims. A lot of those didn't believe it and didn't care. When asked if the war was right they didn't care - it was a chance to have a war and wave the troops off at Southampton. Maybe it's because I lived in an army town, but it does not say good things about our electorate.

In both cases, a part of the problem was the failure of the Opposition party when it was the party of Government. But both Conservative and Labour parties have failed badly as a Parliamentary Opposition, each being fragmented by their internal differences.

I don't know how well that translates to US politics, but I get the impression that the Republican Party has the more centralised control of their image--a team of vicious, deporaved, sociopaths, but at least a team.

It's a little different now the roles are reversed. The Conservatives since 1997 have never been credible, or even effective in opposition. Tony Blair isn't that good at the despatch box, faced with a brilliant opposition leader, William Hague needled him every week for years, but this didn't translate into electoral gains. It didn't matter to the public as a whole. This may be about to change with the election of David Cameron as Conservative Leader, but one of the major problems is that New Labour is actually very conservative, and there many many things that are controversial in the Labour party that the Conservative Party naturally supports...which brings us back to the war in Iraq. The Conservative Party supported the war, and this has absolutely crippled them in their opposition to Blair over the issue. There is simply no way they can take advantage of Blair's mistakes, regardless of leader. We have had to look to the media to do it. We've had intelligence sources speak out, too, and what happened? Four journalists were sacked (one the Director General of the BBC), some with direct connections to the issue, some connected indirectly, and the pressure put on that source, together with the smear campaign against him, led him to commit suicide. For years we've had stories in the papers on the issue, something new every few weeks, and nothing sticks. The papers have dug up everything possible to get at Blair on this, every story that is even only tangentially related, but the effect it has really had is that even people who cared originally have begun to get bored with the issue.

Both parties seem to be reading from the same prayerbook. And both of them have successfully demoralized and fragmented their opponents.

Is the current New Labour upset a sign of things to come for the neocon wing of the Republicans? I note with interest that Jack Straw had gotten himself away from the tar baby that is the Foreign Office, ahead of the blowback from the forthcoming Iraq withdrawal. (It may be tomorrow, it may not be until 2008, but whoever's in the hot seat when it arrives is going to be looking for a new career outside of politics afterwards.)

Rugby players???

Here was the AP's take:

Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst and noted critic of the war in Iraq, waited patiently in line to question Rumsfeld, then let loose.

"Why did you lie to get us into a war that caused these kind of casualties and was not necessary?" McGovern said.

"I did not lie," shot back a feisty Rumsfeld, who waved off security guards ready to remove McGovern from the hall at the Southern Center for International Studies.

So. Someone confronts Rumsfeld with direct proof that he was lying, leaving him totally flummoxed. The AP story quotes him with what could just be a wild baseless generalized accusation, and leaves us with a Rummy full of righteous indignation, instead of sputtering as he's left without a leg to stand on.

Just what is going on here?

I like your idea about Jack Straw, Charlie - it hadn't occurred to me he got out of it on purpose. The BBC talk today is that Iraq is fading as an election issue, but I heard an interview with some Labour activists today who had worked for other parties in the local election campaign, and who named the war in Iraq and the way the government took us into that war as their reasons for defecting. So perhaps the older factions are beginning to fight back? WMD have kind of faded from the spotlight, but Iraq is still there, and it's certainly the issue that Blair will be remembered by. He's very concerned with his 'legacy'.

First, they're playing it on the news networks instead of sweeping it under the rug. That's different.

Second, the NBC commentator asked one of the other news people something to this effect: "They normally pre-screen these audiences very carefully. What's going on with something like this getting through? Does this mean they're just unable to find enough administration supporters to fill an audience these days?"

Just one google search is enough to discover that
Rumsfeld said those words on March 30 2003, which was after the beginning of the war (11th day of the war), and so saying that he was "sharply questioned about his pre-war claims about WMD in Iraq" is a lie from "the good folks at Think Progress", and a very misleading lie at that. It makes the reader assume that the quote from Rumsfeld was pre-war, a part of the justification effort for the war, and that obviously makes a huge difference.

Why did you feel compelled to repeat that lie?

"[Saddam has] amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of biological weapons, including Anthrax, botulism, toxins and possibly smallpox. He's amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX, Sarin and mustard gas." --Donald Rumsfeld, 9/19/02

"[Saddam's] regime has large, unaccounted-for stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons -- including VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas; anthrax, botulism, and possibly smallpox -- and he has an active program to acquire and develop nuclear weapons." – Donald Rumsfeld, 1/20/03

Those are some of the "pre-war claims" that "We know where they are" referenced. In fact, they weren't "in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." They weren't anywhere at all, and there hadn't been any in Iraq in ten years. Rumsfeld either knew it or should have known it.

Then the story broke about the incompetent handling of immigrants who had been convicted of serious crimes, but had vanished on completion of their sentence. Some could have been deported, some should have been tracked, under laws that covered their specific crimes.

As you can imagine, this provided a wonderful opportunity for the politicians to safely say the same sorts of stuff about (some) immigrants as the BNP did. "Deport them all!" sounds much the same, whether you're talking about the bloody darkies or about roughly a thousand criminals.

In the election, the BNP picked up a handful of seats in a few local councils, and became the second-largest party in one.

And straight afterwards there was a cabinet reshuffle that booted the Home Secretary, got Jack Straw clear of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and replaced him with a woman who is responsible for a 1.6 billion Pound balls-up involving a gross failure to implement EU directives.

Margaret Beckett was even praised for her loyalty, but her record of dealing with foreign lands is hardly a glowing one.

The Cabinet reshuffle pretty well had to wait until after the election, and I doubt it was forced by the poor results for the Labour Party, but the promotion of failures does suggest that Tony Blair has run out of steam. He can't even get rid of a deputy who seems to have a Clintonesque approach to office affairs.

And, while Bill Clinton is hardly one of the world's beautiful people, it's much harder to look at a photograph of John Prescott and imagine him being offered a blow-job. (Still, what do I know? I'm a guy.)

(Well. maybe there's a greenish tinge to my opinion--it's a long time since I was offered a blow-job.)

To be honest, looking at the record of the Cabinet since 1997, another "gay sex romp" would be less of a surprise than Prescott getting laid.

Thanks for digging up those quotes again.