“Measure of judgement”? Hmmmmm. How about corpses? Great honking piles of dead folks. Would that qualify as a measure of judgement?
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The CIA said the tubes were for centrifuges. The DOE said they were not. There were conflicting expert analyses of the issue. Choosing to believe one over the other does not make a lie. Indeed, as your own cite points out, Powell’s speech acknowledged that there were diverging expert opinions, although clearly giving more credit to the CIA version.
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I agree that the administration has not been top-notch about admitting they were wrong. THAT DOES NOT MAKE A LIE. A statement is a lie at the moment it’s made. You’re saying that this statement only became a lie retroactively when they failed to come back and correct it after the truth became apparent. That’s an odd definition of “lie.”
Logic like this makes the baby Jesuits cry.
Face it.
GW has been trying to get his butt out of serious trouble since he got us into this unjust war. He has been grabbing at straws trying to justify his bad decision since the first skeptic spoke up. He even stooped to asking about the patriotic behavior of anyone questioning his decision.
Apparently some figure that its OK for the president to treat any wild rumor as fact if it helps justify his decision to go to war.
GW reminds me of my teenage kids wild excuses trying to justify their behavior.
What Boxer did was point out that Condi also lacks the feeling she should be held accountable for her actions ie the impune my integrity comment.
So you’re suggesting someone had told him unequivocally that those trailers had been confirmed as labs? And that person still has a job?
A cite for what? That he made the claim or that the IEAE denied the existence of the report. The WH didn’t exactly help him because their clarification itself was a falsehood.
Ok, so Bush cites a report that never existed. The WH then says he was talking about a different report from 1991…that also never existed.
There was never any further clarification. There was also no claim by the WH that Bush had recieved a bad briefing. Why shouldn’t I believe that W was simply being dishonest?
That’s a relevant distinction. There is no question the analyses he relied upon were wrong. That certainly suggests incompetence, but doesn’t prove it. To prove incompetence, you have to show that a reasonably-skilled analyst would have reached a different conclusion.
[/QUOTE]
Here you go, Bricker. Spin away:
Bush Documents Supporting Iraq Attack Do Not Exist
All kinds of assorted Bushit on that page.
Have fun.
Give the counselor his due. His strenuously-argued alternative case, that Bush actually just doesn’t give a damn what the truth is, is certainly “objectively reasonable”.
How he considers that a superior state of affairs is puzzling, though, and more than a bit sad. A liar at least does know what the truth is, and is aware of the extent to which his “misstatements” diverge from it. A claim that Bush isn’t even up to that level is not one that an “objectively reasonable” person would consider worth defending. Bricker, you might as well admit Bush is a liar - that would be better.
Sure. As would many others. How about – Money spent? Number of contracts awarded to US companies? Percentage of US budget spent on military action? Number of countries decrying US foreign policy? Number of protests, in and/or outside the US?
Feel free to come up with more, though yours might be the easiest to quantify. The question in each of these cases is whether more is better…
I’m suggesting exactly that - although I have no idea what job consequences would be in place; civil service regs often prevent outright firing no matter of severe a mistake is made. I’m suggesting that anyone at the core of such an error should no longer be producing intel for the president.
A cite for the proposition that he knew there was no such report. I don’t picture the President reading each and every government report. I picture someone preparing a summary and saying, “Sir, the 1998 IEAE report says thus-and-so.”
Was there a follow-up question - “We checked the new date and there wasn’t a report there either. What was the President referring to?”
I am Truth’s Servant.
I don’t care what state of affairs would be better. I want to know what the state of affairs IS.
How you can type that with – presumably – a straight face is beyond me.
I’m having a hard time with the purported equivalence here.
Boxer technically lied, but her statement wasn’t particularly misleading. The resolution wasn’t solely about WMD, but it was largely about them, and the subsidiary reasons were not held to be important at that time, but only began to be trumpeted after it became clear that there weren’t going to be any WMD found.
Most of Bush’s statements, on the other hand, are technically true. However, a great many of them are constructed so as to be misleading (intentionally, imo). Take, for example, the incessant juxtapositions of Saddam and 9/11 in Bush speeches. Here’s an example from the 2003 State of the Union Address:
Not an untruth to be seen, but the intent is clearly to connect in people’s minds Saddam and the 9/11 bombings in order to sell the idea that Saddam posed a terrorist threat to the US. This strategy worked, as is evidenced by the many polls showing the ridiculously high number of Americans who believe that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. And the frequency with which statements like this were made by the administration, and the carefulness of the phrasing, suggests to me that this was nothing short of a well orchestrated campaign to mislead the public on this point. To sell them snake oil, and to do so without saying anything technically false. I know of no other reasonable explanation for the nature of these statements.
So Boxer did lie, but didn’t substantially mislead. Bush rarely lies outright (though there are a few examples given in this thread), but routinely misleads in substantial fashion. To my mind, willful misleading is the morally odious act, not telling technical untruths. So I ask: where is this moral equivalence supposed to lie?
::grabs crotch::
The President is not simply another civil servant, his position is invested with extraordinary responsibility. He isn’t drafted for his position, he must run for it, he must put himself forward as a candidate and say “I can do this, I can shoulder this nearly superhuman burden. I can be trusted not to mislead, not to lie.” We have every right to demand a scrupulous attention to facts, we have every right to expect that he goes the extra mile, or ten, or twenty, to insure that we are not misled on issues wherein innocent lives, by the thousands, are at risk. If he is not up to the task, he need not run, he need not place himself in a position that demands more than he has to offer.
But once he places his hand upon that Bible, all such evasions are moot. Bush’s record is plain: when offered doubt, he ignored it. He had every opportunity to hesitate and gather more facts, he did not, he rushed forward as though the matter were settled beyond question, when clearly it wasn’t.
Friend Bricker combs through Ms. Boxer, and finds a nit to pick. A lie! he triumphantly exclaims. A lie of minor consequence, Dr. Rice’s “integrity” is “impugned”, if “impugned” can be meant as “accurately assessed and stated.”
He then implies a moral equivalence: consequences are of no importance, all lies are equal, the fact that the Bushivik’s falsehoods result in the deaths of thousands of innocents is not relevent. This is an argument more theological than reasonable. He is welcome to it, so long as he doesn’t expect it to be taken seriously.
The problem is, at least as I understand it, the belief that they were for centrifuges was a minority opinion even within the CIA, and we don’t even know what the minority was: one analyst? Two? But the opinions were being cherry-picked out of the CIA rather than all views being given fair hearing. Only the “right” answers were getting into the reports. That’s a serious problem that Congress litterally went out of its way to deliberately state that it would NOT investigate or conclude anything about… yet.
We should note that lies ALSO include saying something is true when in fact you know that you do NOT know whether or not it is true.
Thanks for the laugh.
Indeed. The state of affairs is that you loyally support a president who is WORSE than a liar. One whose blithe disregard for the facts has caused thousands of unnecessary deaths, the destruction of our national credibility, and the continued freedom of the mass murderer of 9/11.
That’s the truth. Now tell us what a *real * servant of it would do.
Eh, it’s par for the course for the right – it’s a horrible sin if their opponents do it, but it’s perfectly acceptable when coming from one of their own.
When Bill Clinton split hairs over the definition of “is,” :rolleyes: it was a horrible crime and proof positive of his moral degeneracy.
When the Bush Administration splits hairs over the definition of “torture”, :eek: it’s no big deal and shouldn’t impede the selection of a new Attorney General.
The purported equivalence, one of Bricker’s (and other Bush/GOP apologists’; he didn’t invent it) favorite techniques - that of excusing any kind of malfeasance, misfeasance, or moral turpitude by the automatic saying of “Well, the other guys are just as bad, maybe worse!” Unfortunately for the Service of Truth, when asked for the facts that led them to that conclusion, and especially when presented with contrary facts, they simply slink away and hope the subject will be forgotten.
But that doesn’t stop them from trying it again, does it? This isn’t Bricker’s first time pulling that stunt, which as you’ll remember was one of december’s favorites as well. It has yet to succeed here among the non-pre-fooled, though.
We can look at this whole thing from 2 viewpoints.
Let’s assume both lied. Which set of lies seems more deliberate? Which set of lies touched off a war and a fair sized body count?
Let’s assume both were just mistaken. Which had a larger and more consistent set of mistakes?? Which set of mistakes touched off a war and a fair sized body count?
I side with Boxer and against Bush. surprise surprise.
Yes. And Iago was Othello’s servant. And Bush is a public servant. I’m starting to understand. And it worries me.