Scylla:
IMO, you have an unusually circumscribed definition of “lying” and “truth-telling.” In your view, apparently, one must be clairvoyant, almost, before one can accuse someone of dishonesty. I find this perspective strange, especially in relation to politicians. For me, having come to political awareness during the Vietnam war (and especially Watergate), I’m afraid they’re lying is my default position, regardless of whether or not “they” are Democrats or Republicans.
And the amazing thing about your defense of the administration is that by employing it, at least as far as I can see, one can never determine whether or not our leaders are lying to us – because lying and telling the truth present exactly the same appearance from your perspective. In other words, truth and lie look exactly alike. For example, you point out in your reply to Elvis:
And there is no doubt some truth to this. But if I were an investment counselor, and I was aware that the general expert opinion regarding investment X was, “X is a bad investment” – with the exception of the financial managers of investment X, who assured me that it was sound – would I be lying if I were to say to you, “There is no room for doubt that X is a sound investment”? If I told you that, and withheld from you to the best of my ability the contrary opinions of the experts, would you think I was lying? If you were to take my advice, invest in X, and then lose all of your money, might you not bitterly wonder afterwards if you had been taken to the cleaners? That I had lied to you? Or would you excuse me for simply making an honest mistake?
If you have the time, I would like to hear your response to my previous post, above, concerning Bush’s claim that Iraq had attempted to purchase unprocessed uranium from Niger. To my knowledge, my reconstruction of the course of events surrounding that claim is accurate, and it also provides a good example of willful mendacity on the part of the administration; a concerted effort, on their part, to take what they knew, extract from it those elements that supported the case for war, and bury/ignore the rest. In this particular case, however, the rest came back to bite them on their ass.
In the other thread where we’ve been discussing these issues you’ve said repeatedly that you can’t understand why someone would lie if they knew they were going to get caught. But with regard to this we can also ask ourselves a couple of other questions: 1) Did the administration know it was going to get caught? 2) Does the administration care if it gets caught?
Here what’s I think: with regard to the first question, I suspect the administration knew that much of the information it had was of questionable nature, even though they claimed otherwise (i.e., that it was reliable). I think they did this because they were relatively certain they would find something in Iraq – some forgotten centrifuges in a storage locker, a cache of old chemical shells, or a bit of jissom in a mason jar on the back shelf of some lab – that they could retroactively exploit to justify their pre-war claims. And I think as well that you see this strategy playing itself out now, with regard to the vial of botulinum bacteria, for example. Has not elucidator, in post after post over the last months, bemoaned the lowering of the bar to such a point that literally anything, a forgotten mason jar of bad germs for example, could be touted by the administration as an example of “WMDs?” Isn’t that exactly what Bush and his cronies are doing now? Didn’t McClellan recently claim that there was no other use for botulinum except to “kill people,” and that the vial they found should rightfully be considered a “WMD”?
The administration could release some of its pre-war intelligence to show why it felt as strongly as it did; and if that intelligence was strong, Bush might thereby partially regain some of his credibility. He has not chosen to do so. In fact, it appears as if he’s planning to exploit a different strategy: he’s planning to claim that they were right all along, and to hell with the truth. And I think I know why: if they were to release their pre-war intelligence, the public would quickly discover that it was about as solid as a piece of wet toilet paper. After all, as far as I am aware, not one of the claims they made prior to war has withstood critical inspection. Hell, three pages of this thread I’ve wasted trying to convince Sam Stone that the administration willfully ignored the judgement of their own technical specialists when they chose to claim that those aluminum tubes were intended for use as uranium refinement centrifuges. Amazing, really, considering the body of evidence I was required to cite in order to make my case, and even then, in the end, Sam balked. What does it take, I wonder? At any rate, the statement “Iraq has purchased aluminum tubes suitable for use in centrifuges,” is both technically inaccurate and false. That’s two false statements (uranium purchase and aluminum tubes) taken from the SOTU – the State of the Union address, fer chrissakes! – that have proven to be wrong, afterwards. One right after the other. Both deployed in Bush’s speech as core justifications for action against Iraq. Both disputed by intelligence experts for months prior to the SOTU. One which the President was eventually forced to recant, due to public pressure. The other, also false, never even recanted. Doesn’t this cause you to at least raise your eyebrows? It doesn’t awaken within you a question about how it could have happened, how much the president really knew before he chose to make those statements, and so on? I mean, you do at least recognize the possibility that Bush was being less than truthful here, yes? Do you not think that such a possibility should be investigated?
This issue connects into the second question. I’m really not convinced that the administration gives a goddamn flying fuck about being caught. Jesus, they had every reason in the world, for example, to expect that there would be a strong reaction to the SOTU claim that Iraq had sought to purchase yellowcake from Niger. They stuffed it in, anyway. Personally, I think they are relying here on what they believe to be the general ignorance and laziness of the American public. They’re hoping that, by projecting a strong image, Americans won’t really care, or even know, that they were lied to. In short, they’re hoping not to be held accountable. They hope they can muddy the water a bit: “some of our intelligence may have been wrong, we found some programs, you can’t prove we lied, Saddam was bad anyway, who cares,” and then simply glide on.
Such an attitude sickens me, and I hope to God it doesn’t succeed. After all, let’s remember: Bush lost the popular election. Even now, the policies he pursues do not have the support of the majority of the people, who actually chose Gore instead.
This cockiness of his has no basis in the electorate. I strongly suspect he’s heading for a serious fall.
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