# My disgust with politics **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 16, 2005, 11:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-disgust-with-politics/326520 "2005-10-16T23:15:24Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 16\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2005, 9:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-disgust-with-politics/326520/41 "2005-10-17T21:08:51Z")
I don’t think that that information established a lie. All it established was that there was disagreement in the intelligence community about the tubes. Thus, if Bush had gone the other way, opining that the tubes were no threat, but then _that_ turned out to be wrong, you could make the exact same argument that he lied. It’s not lying when you make a decision after different people have given you different advice. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2005, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-disgust-with-politics/326520/42 "2005-10-17T21:13:46Z")
> [@Liberal](#): > > I don’t think that that information established a lie. All it established was that there was disagreement in the intelligence community about the tubes. The specific lie I’m talking about was from this bit: > [@](#): > > In early September, the president stated that, according to a 1998 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iraq was within six months of developing nuclear weapons. A spokesperson for the IEAE denied that any such report existed. When asked for clarification, a White House spokesperson said that the report was from 1991, not 1998. Again, the IEAE denied that it had issued such a report. As Dave Trowbridge wrote at his site: His claiming that this report existed was a falsehood told in the service of an intent to deceive. Daniel ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2005, 9:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-disgust-with-politics/326520/43 "2005-10-17T21:17:26Z")
[url=http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/09/20020907-2.html]Search this interview for “remind you” for the specific text of the lie, straight from the House’s mouth. Daniel ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2005, 9:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-disgust-with-politics/326520/44 "2005-10-17T21:18:59Z")
Oy. Try this again, and if someone wants to report my previous post to a mod for cleanup, that’d be swell. [Search this interview](http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/09/20020907-2.html) for “remind you” for the specific text of the lie, straight from the House’s mouth. Daniel ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2005, 9:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-disgust-with-politics/326520/45 "2005-10-17T21:31:39Z")
> [@Liberal](#): > > It’s not lying when you make a decision after different people have given you different advice. When you present a case with two sides in a one-sided manner, I think that can be deemed lying. I never heard any response from the administration about the problems with their interpretation of the aluminum tubes story, for example. Whenever they said something that was later discredited, they ignored the response and kept saying it. They continued making a number of claims, perhaps most notably the Iraqi-Al Qaeda meeting in Prague, after they had been discredited and sometimes entirely disavowed by the people who’d originally made them. I have trouble believing that’s an honest difference of opinion. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2005, 10:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-disgust-with-politics/326520/46 "2005-10-17T22:52:00Z")
> [@John Mace](#): > > Just out of curiosity, does one ever see “Blair lied” bumper stickers in Britain? They’re called “car stickers” over there. The anti-war anti-Blair slogan of choice seems to be the misspelling of his name as [B-Liar](http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/images/blpic-blairliar.htm), which is pretty much the same as “Blair lied”. > [@Cheesesteak](#): > > Do not try and tell me that nobody other than he believed in Saddam’s WMD programs. (BTW, is that grammar correct?) Well, since you ask, no. “Other than” acts as a preposition and must take an object in the objective case. Just as you’d say “Nobody but him believed it”, “Nobody except him believed it”, you have to say “Nobody other than him believed it”. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Hamster\_King](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/8edcca/32.png) [@The\_Hamster\_King](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Hamster_King)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2005, 11:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-disgust-with-politics/326520/47 "2005-10-17T23:02:34Z")
> [@John Mace](#): > > Sums up my position exactly. In fact, I wasn’t even paying that much attention to the whole WMD hulabaloo, since I didn’t want us to invade no matter what. But I thought they’d find something. Maybe not nukes, but probably some bioweapons of some sort. This was my position as well. I was opposed to the war in Iraq on other grounds – I figured it would lead to a long occupation and would stir up Arab opinion against us, making our battle against Al Qaeda harder. But I assumed that the administration would find **some** WMDs – enough to provide a fig leaf for their pre-war claims. But I never thought Iraq was a serious threat to us. It just didn’t make any sense based on my pre-war understanding of Iraq’s security situation. (I was working on terrorism-related videogames at the time and had done a lot of research into real-world terrorist threats. Iraq was very low on the threat list.) It never occurred to me that there weren’t \*\*any \*\* WMDs in Iraq! I thought there might be a moth-balled nerve gas factor or a forgotten freezer with some old anthrax samples in it. It seemed pointless to argue the “there aren’t enough WMDs to be a threat” position before the war because even a small amount could be spun by the administration. Bush lied. He took fragmentary evidence that at most pointed to a small, moribund weapons program and spun it into a massive threat to American security. He thought we would find just enough of something after the invasion to make his pre-war claims credible. And in the warm glow of victory afterwards, who would have the stomach for quibbling? ---
**Author:** ![Frostillicus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e9bcb4/32.png) [@Frostillicus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frostillicus)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2005, 1:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-disgust-with-politics/326520/48 "2005-10-18T01:53:45Z")
“Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out”. – George W. Bush, March 2002. [http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2835.htm](http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2835.htm) ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2005, 2:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-disgust-with-politics/326520/49 "2005-10-18T02:49:40Z")
> [@Pochacco](#): > > I was opposed to the war in Iraq on other grounds – I figured it would lead to a long occupation and would stir up Arab opinion against us, making our battle against Al Qaeda harder. But I assumed that the administration would find **some** WMDs – enough to provide a fig leaf for their pre-war claims. That was my initial position, too. It wasn’t until I’d argued with people who really supported the thing elsewhere on the Web that I started to think “these people can’t be serious - they have nothing,” and came to think probably weren’t any weapons at all. ---
**Author:** ![Sevastopol](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/cdc98d/32.png) [@Sevastopol](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sevastopol)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2005, 4:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-disgust-with-politics/326520/50 "2005-10-18T04:45:28Z")
> [@John Mace](#): > > If you want to prove that Bush lied, you might not want to make up evidence in support of your case, because such fabrications are easily debunked. Unless, of course, you have a cite for that quote… I apologise, those quotation marks can be tricky things. Of course it is not a direct quotation, but a paraphrase I rendered in direct speech. Hence the quotation marks. I assumed it was obvious from the hyperbole. Nonetheless it is an accurate paraphrase of the certainty, size of the supposed threat and the imperative to disregard the evidence being produced by Dr Blix. Lastly, as anticipated all the faithful have posted their bushlove posts and fled. It was never about debate. ---
**Author:** ![Sevastopol](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/cdc98d/32.png) [@Sevastopol](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sevastopol)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2005, 4:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-disgust-with-politics/326520/51 "2005-10-18T04:48:39Z")
> [@Frostillicus](#): > > “Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out”. – George W. Bush, March 2002. > > [http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2835.htm](http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2835.htm) Good story. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2005, 7:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-disgust-with-politics/326520/52 "2005-10-18T07:04:45Z")
Yeah, I must say that evidence of intentional lying is compelling at least to the degree of preponderance. Okay, you’ve all convinced me. ---
**Author:** ![jshore](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/b5e925/32.png) [@jshore](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jshore)\ **Post date:** [October 19, 2005, 9:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-disgust-with-politics/326520/53 "2005-10-19T21:54:43Z")
Is the OP going to come back to defend his thesis or are we to assume we have pretty much of a consensus here? ---
**Author:** ![PatriotX](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/c4cdca/32.png) [@PatriotX](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PatriotX)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2005, 1:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-disgust-with-politics/326520/54 "2005-10-20T01:49:27Z")
The WMD are all but a red herring. At issue is the quality of threat presented to the US by Iraq. The position of the US Intel Community at the time was that Hussein was “drawing a line short” of and unlikely to be in the “foreseeable future” attacking the US directly or by proxy with WMD or conventional weapons. He wasn’t going to risk what Dr, Rice called “national obliteration” to score would may have eneded up being posthumous points. Further, despite the US Intelligence Community’s purposely aggressive, exhaustive and repetitive searches for a operational or collaborative relationship between aQ and Saddam, the Community’s assessment was and still is that no such relationship existed. That’s what Team Bush was hearing on the issue while they were out pimping the Atta/Prague connection, Salman Pak etc, etc, etc. Surely there’s no one here brazen enough to try and make the case that Team Bush did not sell the invasion on the basis of preventing Saddam from attacking the US quite possibly through his ties to aQ. All of Team Bush’s cacophonous din to the contrary was made in spite of the[Best Information Available at the Time](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=310455). This is where the [Office of Special Plans](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=199309&page=1&pp=50) (OSP) and the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group comes in. They were the folks who, (among other things), ‘found’ the evidence for the connections where the US Intel Community said there were none. ---
**Author:** ![Hentor\_the\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/8edcca/32.png) [@Hentor\_the\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hentor_the_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2005, 2:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-disgust-with-politics/326520/55 "2005-10-20T02:17:13Z")
Here’s my previous post summarizing the lie put forth within a 2-3 day period in 2002 by three Bush administration officials, Ari Fleisher, Donald Rumsfeld and Condi Rice: [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=5982775&postcount=116](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=5982775&postcount=116) The timing and wording of their statements can only be interpreted as a concerted administration effort to push the lie that al Quada was working with Iraq. Of course, we appear to have a brand new lie to talk about, since it was reported today that Bush knew of Rove’s involvement in the Plame leak from roughly the beginning, but made public statements to the contrary, and reportedly gave testimony to Fitzgerald to the contrary after that time. Oopsie. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2005, 1:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-disgust-with-politics/326520/56 "2005-10-20T13:48:58Z")
> [@Hentor the Barbarian](#): > > Here’s my previous post summarizing the lie put forth within a 2-3 day period in 2002 by three Bush administration officials, Ari Fleisher, Donald Rumsfeld and Condi Rice: > > [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=5982775&postcount=116](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=5982775&postcount=116) > > The timing and wording of their statements can only be interpreted as a concerted administration effort to push the lie that al Quada was working with Iraq. By the strictest definition of a lie, I’m not convinced that these qualify: a lie requires a falsehood told in service of a deceitful end, and while the deceitful end is certainly there, I’m having trouble finding the outright falsehoods. I think this is deliberate on the administration’s part: it’s the equivalent of the kid who thinks he can promise whatever he wants as long as his fingers are crossed. As long as the Administration never actually said something factually incorrect, they could mislead and distort and out-of-contextify everything as much as they wanted. But the Administration’s statements in that post are all technically true, as near as I can tell. They talked about numerous contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq, and acted as though this showed collaboration. Obviously it doesn’t, or else you’d have to say that the US was collaborating with Iraq immediately before and after the 1991 Gulf War. Daniel [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/my-disgust-with-politics/326520.md?page=2)