Proof is unequivocal, is it not?
Oh my yes. Plenty of evidence for that.
Read The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder by Vincent Bugliosi.
The premise is, as the title suggests, prosecuting Bush for murder. There are many questions whether such a thing is doable but the case laid against Bush in the book is overwhelming.
Long story short there is abundant proof Bush lied about this.
No, not even in court.
As I said, if you’re determined not to see it, you won’t.
On the other hand, given that same so-called ‘proof’, couldn’t one just as easily (and with just as much validity) claim that if one is determined to see it, one will?
ElvisL1ves, If you’ve got something to say about non-coalition casualties, fucking say it. Getting all nitpicky when someone brings up American and allied deaths contributes nothing here.
SA, not all doubt is reasonable, is it?
squink, I did say it. Got a problem with it?
Squink, your cite seems to me to boil down to nothing more than: Bush said Iraq had WMDs; none were found, therefore Bush lied.
Yes, no?
Elvis, apart from moral considerations, do you favor the death penalty?
Well, I do like to see posts that actually add to a discussion, but if you want to toss insults around, have at it.
No. What it says is that the Bush admin made unequivocal and positive statements on topics about which there was, to the administration’s knowledge, a great deal of uncertainty.
And you know this how? I saw nothing in that cite but unsupported allegations and statements by administration officals based on the evidence they had at that time.
I didn’t say I knew anything. You purported to summarise Squink’s cite and asked if your summary was accurate. Your summary was grossly inaccurate. I pointed this out.
This is not directed to you, per say, Princhester, so please don’t take it personally (seriously), but this is getting old. There was uncertainty. Big fucking deal! There were also, I’m sure pros AND cons for acting militarily. This is true of ANY military action. Sheeze does anyone think we just sent troops to the Pacific in WWII, to Europe twice, to Korea, to Vietnam, to the Gulf War without examining the facts, looking at options and weighing pros and cons? Come on, people, grow up. This evaluation is done. It is an inexact science. Sometimes we get it wrong, like we did this time. But an administration has the responsibility to figure out what it thinks is the best course of action. Next, it falls to them to rally the troops, so to speak, get the country—and the world behind them. Because, once they know action is going to take place, it behooves us, as a nation to have as many people on board as possible. In order to do that, it is incumbent upon them to put the most attractive face on the action possible.Is this news to some people? Seriously. Every President has done the exact same thing. Bush got it wrong, particularly what to do after the initial fighting was over. Kennedy got Vietnam wrong. It happens. It will happen again. But this idea that the administration has the responsibility to air all the pros and cons of military action and take a vote on it is as ridiculous as it is naive.
Let it be known that nominations for Understatement of the Year, 2008, are effectively closed.
Finally, I won something. I never win anything.
What you said was: “No. What it says is that the Bush admin made unequivocal and positive statements on topics about which there was, to the administration’s knowledge, a great deal of uncertainty.”
Now, I see all sorts of allegations in that cite, but I don’t see one claiming to know what the administrations knowledge was, and/or how much uncertainty existed. I therefore concluded you must have knowledge of this yourself.
Since you evidently don’t, perhaps you can point to the place in the cited information where it can be unequivocally illustrated that the administration knowingly made positive statements of fact while experiencing at the same time a great deal of uncertainty?
The fact of the matter is, no one knows what Bush’s thoughts were, what his actual motivations were, what he knew or didn’t know, and what he attempted to accomplish by his public statements, but Bush himself.
There is no proof that Bush lied. There is only circumstantial evidence, which is willingly contrued by his detractors as proof that he deliberately lied about Iraqi WMDs.
This meme is largely accepted as incontrovertible fact around here and it simply isn’t so.
You miss the point. The allegation is that the Bush admin misled about the extent of certainty. The article in question suggests it did.
Nobody here is suggesting that it is, per se, inappropriate for a government to make decisions in the absence of certainty.
That article:
Almost the entire thrust of the article is that there was great uncertainty, and information to that effect was available to the admin.
I know you don’t believe the article. You may also say there is no evidence that the Bush admin had any idea what its intelligence agencies knew or thought concerning the very topics upon which the admin was pontificating (and if so we can at least agree on something: the admin is or was a bunch of total incompetents).
But regardless of what you believe or disbelieve, your characterisation of what the article is saying was a gross mischaracterisation.
Evidence meet faith.
Faith meet evidence.
It’s the old story of the love that can never be. Imagine how much more difficult it is to convince people that a President of such implacable integrity as Clinton lied, a task for Titans.
I just spent the last thirty minutes composing a point by point assessment of the excerpts you quoted and how they may well not have told the whole story, and the hamsters just ate it. I will try to reconstruct it tomorrow…for now, I’m off to bed.
Upon reflection, and in reading the linked article as opposed to the info quoted above, I have little choice but to agree with you that it was, and I hereby retract that erroneous characterization.
Since this seems to have turned into yet another wank-fest about the meaning of “lied,” and I take full blame for that, my title having summarized a point badly and baldly, I’d like to try to return to my original point (mostly available to those of you who had been following the Tony Snow with fiendish closeness or those of you who followed the link in the OP) which was this:
**Fuji ** disputed my contention that Bush rationalized aggressive war “in a misguided attempt to restore national pride and other imperialistic reasons” as “a highly contentious one with regard to Dubya’s regime.” I felt that this was a mild, even fairly neutral, assertion on my part, and was surprised that anyone would characterize my reasons for Bush’s invasion of Irag as “highly contentious,” and so invited him here to discuss it–but we seem to have gotten off-track (my bad, again), partly because Fuji hasn’t shown up yet and partly because I very sloppily summarized what this debate was supposed to be about.
That’s not sophistry. That’s insensitivity. And I did mention the Iraqi deaths.
Given the context of the debate and my post, I would have thought it obvious that this implied innocent Iraqi civilians.