Saturday, February 10, 2007

Bush Administration just reports - we're responsible for the decisions

The latest in our universally-erroneous tendency to think the Bush Administration supports what it's saying, when anyone can figure out they're merely relaying news items to the rest of us:


So, you remember all that, um, stuff created by Doug Feith's private intelligence shop in the Pentagon back in 2002 and 2003? You know, the stuff about how Saddam Hussein had close ties to al-Qaeda and possessed an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons? The stuff that helped justify a catastrophic preventive war that's still raging four years later?

Yeah, that stuff. Today, Feith tells us what it actually was:

This was not "alternative intelligence assessment." It was from the start a criticism of the consensus of the intelligence community, and in presenting it I was not endorsing its substance.


This has been clear for years about the Bush Administration, yet we insist on misinterpreting their words. For example, these ones:

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Conservative hero, David Horowitz, understood it well enough:

The British government continued to stand by its report, making the presidential statement literally true.


Chris Mooney actually thinks Bush was expressing an opinion that there was a meaningful debate of global warming when Bush said
a debate existed over whether global warming was "manmade or naturally caused." In fact, Bush was just pointing out that people were arguing, and like Doug Feith, was not endorsing the substance of whether it was meaningful. Therefore, the administration is completely consistent in saying that "Beginning in June 2001, President Bush has consistently acknowledged climate change is occurring and humans are contributing to the problem."

We need to get this stuff straight.

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