Nah, you’re being too logical and insufficiently spin conscious. Your point is far too subtle to matter.
By aggressively denying the minor issue, they can sidetrack the debate away from the major issue.
My prediction is that Bush’s spin team (and they are the reigning Champions of Spin) will ensure that if in a month or two’s time you were to hold a poll of the US public about what this Memo implied, an astonishing proportion would say: “that planning for the post war period was inadequate”.
This is absolutely false. The Iraq invasion was not pre-determined in 2002…
It was more like 2000. 
Sure, but rather than ignore the whole thing, and thus signal the press that the story’s not newsworthy, they trotted out a b-team white house spokesman out for a rare sunday news conference. When Team Bush acts quickly, it usually means that a) they’ve done something wrong, and b) they’re nervous about it.
Yes, well you may be right about that but I’d still say that while you are interested enough to notice these details, I suspect that Bush’s spin doctors have got it right, in terms of playing to Joe Average.
Personally, I wouldn’t take the bait until I was absolutely sure that the memo(s) is real and has a considerable amount of irrefutable proof behind it. It seems to me that the Repukes are waiting for the media to take the bait in a way similar to that document that was going to prove Bush got out of Vietnam because of his daddy’s clout. We all know this is probably true but the issue is now dead because CBS jumped on it prematurely. Seems to me that this was intended by someone who wanted to take the wind out of the sails of this controversy. Seems to me like it was set up.
The Downing Street Memo is probably correct but we should not blame the media for not taking what could be a well contrived plan to diminish the argument that Bush wanted to go to war with Iraq by any means nessessary. Hopefully, someone in the media is tracking all of this down and is assembling a case against dumbfuck that he will be unable to slither out of.
The moral is: Don’t take the bait so quickly. Seems to me like no one (ie Bush and his cronies) is really refuting the document. It’s almost like an invite to blow it out of proportion only to later prove that the document is disingenuous and thus rendering the whole question moot. I think that the media should be careful at this point because I believe that this administration is not above sabotage.
P.S. Notice that the Newsweek story dropped off the radar because, guess what? There WAS abuse of the Koran at Gitmo! Sounds to me like good reporting.
Well, it was the 2nd lead story on ABC evening news tonight.
BTW, Michael Kinsley wrote an interesting editorial today on the Downing St Memo. British memo shows only that liberals are excitable.
Got a non-subscription link?
Kinsley is one hundred percent right.
Kinsley is 100% right about what? The memo being mild or that no one cares? I think that I care. I think many people on the board care. I think people with friends and family in Iraq care. I think the majority of the American people care. Just because the Republicans dismiss it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter. As far as the memo being mild, it’s hard to get out from under “fixing” intelligence around justification for war.
This story has legs and will continue to grow. I hope the memo is genuine as well. I pray that someone is doing follow-up because this memo may not have presaged everything that happened but it sure draws focus to the justifications for a fucked up war that is going nowhere fast.
One must assume Mr. Kinsley’s eyes are brown.
Of course it isn’t. Its merely another drip, of the drip, drip, drip that occurs when someone pees down your neck and tells you its raining. On its own, damaging but not damning. It is not, however, remotely on its own, we have testimony from any number of knowledgeable sources, Mr. Allen and Clarke, for instance. Mr. Kinsley is firmly denying a claim never made: that the DSM, on its own, is proof positive.
Well, yes and no. Just about a year before, Colin Powell and the delightful Ms. Rice had publicly declared Iraq’s utter helplessness. A charitable man might be able to convince himself that the Bushiviks truly believed that Saddam had WMD, but the leap of faith required to make that an urgent threat to the US is the faith that surpasseth understanding.
“I say, C, is this official Washington you’re talking about? Any substance to this?”
“Why, no, Tony, just the tone I surmised from cocktail parties and policy wonk chit-chat. Now that you mention it, I maybe should have checked that out a bit more…”
Please. Kinsley is making a suggestion he cannot begin to substantiate, that somehow “C” was a shallow observer, connected only to an ethereal entity called “Washington”.
“Rummy, this is Your Leader. That English intelligence guy is here. Look, take him out to a titty bar, get him drunk, but don’t tell him nothing…”
Sure. Right.
But he did. Woodward told the story, how he stuck his head into Condi Rices office and said “Bleepity bleep! We’re taking Saddam out!” So far as I know, the Bushiviks never denied this story, mostly because they were so giddy and giggly about Woodward’s depiction as a firm, oh-so-manly Leader who thinks from his gut. (Funny, when the chicks do it, we call it “intuition”, when we do it, its “thinking from our guts”. Testosterone poisoning. All great leaders rely on such viseral cognition. Custer, for instance)
Why would he be expected to have specifics? Was the memo supposed to have the order of battle a year in advance? At this point, the war was merely a playful gleam in Death’s eye.
Quite so. Merely an observation. From an intelligence professional. Apparently one rather well respected amongst the Blair Boys, else they would not have sent him, now would they?
Ah, there’s those quote marks again. Isn’t wonderful how much you can imply with just a couple of jumped-up apostrophe’s. Too bad he doesn’t have a “wink” smiley availabe.
If Robert Scheer is left wing, I’m a bomb throwing anarchist Wobbly.
Anybody else want to take a crack at this silly sumbitch?
I have this feeling that Thursday is going to consist mostly of me trying to check updates on those hearings while pretending to work…
Oooops. Not “Mr. Allen” but Mr. O’Neill.
‘Poison from the goonads [sic].’
Hey, does Condoleeza Rice count as a “nobody” for the right-wing apologists?
From the Los Angeles Times (subscription required, don’t know of a non-subscription link):
I’ve finally heard a story about this on the local news. (CBS affiliate KIRO-7 from Seattle.)
There was a front page article in today’s SJ Mercury News. Congressional hearings are going to be held.
Back to the Kinsley editorial, I think his point was that there isn’t any news there. If you want to make the case about an early decision to go to war, just look at the news articles in 2002.
And the idea that Condi was “enthusiastic about regime change” is just silly if that’s supposed to be damning. Regime change was the freakin’ official policy of the US ever since Congress passed a resolution about it in the late '90s. She damn well better have been enthusiastic about it.
That’s true, but the major difference is the level of confidence in the predictions of the authors of those articles versus the authors of the memos. The authors of the memos had either first-hand knowledge of the policymakers or were policymakers. The authors of the news stories were working off of much less direct evidence. The memos also speak to the issue of WMD being a cover for yet unknown motives. The newspaper stories had no such information and had to take the Admin at its word that the war was to defuse a WMD-based threat.
Enjoy,
Steven
I dunno. Why does anyone need more than the famous Wolfowitz statement about WMDs. I can’t remember the exact wording, but it was something like-- “We just used that reason since it would be the most likely one to actually convince people.”