24 August 2005
Straight Outta Crawford
Goodness, will it ever end? Ms. Sheehan is back.
Here is a comment I offered to the blog entry referenced above. I wonder if 1) It'll be accepted, and 2) Anyone will oblige me my request.
Of course I don’t know Cindy personally but my instincts tell me she’d probably be better off working through her grief privately. I don't see what good can come out of this situation for her. I’ve lost loved ones and the last thing I’d want is to keep the psychic wounds open for partisans of every stripe to pick at. How can this sideshow, the bastard child of a reality TV-obsessed nation and its 24-hour news networks, always racing to be the first to tell us the obvious, bear any fruit?
In my opinion Cindy is being used by forces larger than herself to further their own agendas, and I don’t limit my criticism to any particular section of the political spectrum.
Some of the previous comments make reference to Bush having lied to get the US into the war in Iraq. Would someone do me the favor of discussing this with me? In all seriousness I’d like to have a lively debate on the topic of Bush’s honesty.
Can anyone tell me exactly what he lied about, and, having done so, give me a dictionary definition of a lie? I’m not splitting hairs – I truly believe that Bush didn’t lie, though I do agree that the intelligence upon which he based some of his reasons for going to war in Iraq were unsound. The bad intelligence was the result of decades of intelligence failures, most notably the failure to take Osama bin Laden seriously after the first World Trade Center attack, though there were also significant structural defects in the way the US prevented its intelligence agencies from sharing information.
17:30 Posted in Liberal Follies | Permalink | Comments (5) | Email this
Comments
Well, your comment is posted at Sheehan's site, dated August 25, 2005, 9am. I'd be surprised if it's responded to in a timely fashion; there are several hundred replies to her rant. I think there is some critical threshold that's been crossed, where every reply becomes just more flotsam.
Posted by: 3XHAR | 27 August 2005
It was in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, that President Bush gave the fateful address that sped congressional ratification of the war just days later. The speech was a miasma of self-delusion, half-truths and hype. The president said that "we know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade," an exaggeration based on evidence that the Senate Intelligence Committee would later find far from conclusive.
He said that Saddam "could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year" were he able to secure "an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball." America's own National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1 quoted State Department findings that claims of Iraqi pursuit of uranium in Africa were "highly dubious."
It was on these false premises - that Iraq was both a collaborator on Sept. 11, 2001, and about to inflict mushroom clouds on America - that honorable and brave young Americans were sent off to fight.
Posted by: Chinadoll | 28 August 2005
Plagiarism alert: Chinadoll, isn't this actually something Frank Rich wrote on 8/14/2005? No ideas of your own on this topic, eh? Sad. And boring. When you don't attribute someone else's writing you do them, and your reader, a disservice.
Posted by: 3XHAR | 29 August 2005
Would you now comment on the ideas expressed, please Kev?
Posted by: FrankRich | 30 August 2005
I repeat:
Can anyone tell me exactly what he lied about, and, having done so, give me a dictionary definition of a lie? I’m not splitting hairs – I truly believe that Bush didn’t lie, though I do agree that the intelligence upon which he based some of his reasons for going to war in Iraq were unsound.
If we're going to talk about lies and lying we first need to agree on the definition of a lie. :)
Posted by: Thomas C. Mueller | 30 August 2005
The comments are closed.