Wall, buddie, I think that you’ll find that the likes of Cheney was recorded making statements that included things like “without a doubt” in the same sentence with Iraq and WoMDs.
I’ve been pretty amazed at the whole, " We took out Saddam because he gassed his Kurds and raped plastic shredders," schtick that’s appeared. What blows my mind about it is that some of those spouting it were grown adults in the eighties.
I admit that I voted for Clinton his first time 'round. But remember that he was a local boy who done good and, most importantly, the sleaziness of his looked so tame against the background of Iran-Contra etc.
Feel free to provide an exact quotation, in context, with date.
I’m too lazy to search the web for quotes but I seem to recall a whole speech by the Secretary of State before the U.N. purporting to provide evidence of WMDs.
On the other hand, I will grant you that this Administration is very good at not directly lying but just incredibly deceiving people. After all, they (well, other than Cheney perhaps) have not usually directly said there is a strong connection between September 11th and the former Iraqi regime. They just implied it (and juxtaposed discussions about Iraq with those about terrorism) to the point where a lot of Americans seem to have this false impression (along with others).
After all, when you come right down to it, it depends on what the definition of the word “is” is. 
…After all, outright lies are such annoying things in that you can later be called on them. On the other hand, deceptive statements and innuendo and implication work just about as well and then you can later say, “Well I never said precisely that…”
Who was it ,that said Karl Rove gets wood , everytime Dean speaks
http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/44199.htm
Declan
Holy shit. Even I am stunned and appalled at Dean. Even aside from the sentiments themselves…what kind of fool is he to express them? Good lord, who the hell does he think he’s going to get on his side with that, aside from Noam Chompsky?
And I have to laugh at the NYP…“kill or nab”? NAB?
I’ll say it again: If Dean wins the nomination, Bush will win in a landslide. The guy’s just not ready for primetime. He’s amazingly tone deaf, and routinely makes idiotic statements like the one linked above.
You can bet that each one of these statements is in Karl Rove’s file now, and they’ll be paraded out over and over again during the campaign. And Bush haas over 100 million dollars to spend getting the message out.
Osama kills over 3,000 Americans, and Dean thinks it’s entirely fine to have him tried in a world court that won’t impose the death penalty? I wonder if he has any idea how that notion plays in the ‘flyover states’, or in New York City?
I know as a right-leaning moderate, Sam Stone, I wouldn’t mind a Democrat articulating that message. Frankly, Hillary’s stock has risen lately in my eyes, given that she hasn’t fallen prey to mindless Bush-bashing.
Sam Stone, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
The Democrats MUST marginalize the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” post-haste. Take a page out of the Republican playbook and see how the Pubbies have marginalized the Christian right lately (Buchanan, Falwell, Robertson - have you seen much of these assholes lately?), thereby moving closer to the center.
Sure seems to me that the voices coming out of the Democratic Party are shrill, defeatist and pusillanimous. Where have you gone, Sam Nunn, Scoop Jackson, JFK?
I don’t despise Bush like most of you guys here, but he sure isn’t my favorite pol. Hell, I’d vote for a halfway decent Democrat who realizes we’re in a war we must win (Lieberman), but if the Dems see fit to nominate a turd like Howard Dean, I’ll take it as an admission by the Democratic Party that it is unfit to lead the executive branch of the US federal government.
… I thought it was a good idea to support the rule of law.
Note that the NY Post is not a good place to get anything on Dean from. They prefer Lieberman. Strongly.
This gives a somewhat less… biased version of the quote.
You misunderstand me.
What I was remarking on was the statements that seemed to be getting made just in case Saddam points the US to some undiscovered caches of WMDs. Some here on the SDMB and elsewhere are working out what they might have to say in advance, just in case.
Thus we get all the arguments that say, in essence, “Even if Bush sold the war based on Iraq’s having WMD, and we find some - well, that still doesn’t count!”
This is due to the fact that Dean and others have nailed their colors to the mast of Iraq having no WMDs - an outcome nobody expected, even the Left. If and when they are discovered, they will either have to admit defeat, or come up with some weaseling as they did when the nuclear centrifuge parts and plans were discovered.
Thanks to the SDMB, I get to see in advance what the weaseling might be like.
Regards,
Shodan
So you believe that those parts are legitimate, solid evidence of some sort of weapons program?
Just trying to clarify.
Shodan,
But I fail to see why you are so interested in the “weaseling” of those who didn’t claim to know if there were WMDs in the first place. I personally find the weaseling of those who knew there were significant WMDs and even knew where they were to be more amusing.
To each his own, I suppose.
[I do understand in some sense the trap of lowered expectations that some have fallen into. I.e., because it’s been so long without finding any WMDs and because many have been pointing out their lack, now any WMDs will be used to say, “See, I told you so!” without any thought given to whether the more important question of whether these constituted any sort of significant threat that could only be dealt with by going in and overthrowing the Iraqi regime.]
The trouble being that there are so few of these around.
Especially on the SDMB. There basically isn’t anyone who ever claimed pre-invasion that Saddam didn’t have any WMDs. Clinton, her husband, Lieberman, Gebhardt, Kerry, etc., etc., all agreed with each other that Saddam was violating the inspection regime. Dean had not come to national attention before the invasion, and I am reasonably sure no one would be able to come up with a cite from Dean prior to the invasion where he states unambiguously that Saddam has no WMDs. Which is fortunate for him, as he has staked his entire credibility on the issue. I am morbidly interested in what he might say if and when Saddam points the US to some hidden caches of chemicals or anthrax. Probably very similar to what cult members say after their predictions of Armageddon don’t come true.
AFAIK, the only person on the SDMB who tried to claim that he knew all along that Saddam didn’t have any WMDs is Diogenes the Cynic, and I actually dug up a cite of one of his earlier posts to show that he was suffering from creative memory. I will find the link if you are interested.
Right, and this is the sort of thinking I am interested in.
This is similar to what went around when they discovered the cache of nuclear centrifuge parts and plans buried in the Iraqi scientist’s back yard. Certainly clear evidence of the kind of thing Saddam was trying to hide, and that he was trying to stall the inspections until the Axis of Weasel ran out of patience and lifted the regime. Then he fires up the centrifuges, puts his mobile weapons labs back online, and starts working his way back towards nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail.
The way the nuclear evidence was dealt with was to basically ignore it for the reasons you cite - anything short of a fully armed ICBM targetted on New York City will be dismissed as insufficient evidence. Same for the mobile weapons labs - if it is possible that it might have been used for any other purpose, no matter what, then Bush was lying and it was all a scam, etc., etc.
So if they come across a warehouse full of anthrax tomorrow morning, I am sure the Usual Suspects will say that it doesn’t count, since Saddam doesn’t have enough to kill more than a few thousand people, or that he doesn’t have any ICBMs, or that there is no evidence he was going to use them on the US, or something.
Regards,
Shodan
I think you misread what I wrote. I agree with you on this…except I would argue that many of these people didn’t say Saddam definitely has WMD but rather that we didn’t know whether he did or not, which is why an intrusive inspections regime was a good thing but invading a country because we think they might be up to no-good, even though we have severely limited what no-good they could be up to, was not.
Well, that is all well and good but it is pure and utter speculation. There is no evidence that Saddam ever was planning to do something so suicidal. The only thing he ever did with WMDs in the past was to use them in a case where he knew the U.S. would give him the “We really think using such weapons is not very nice…wink, wink” treatment. And, the fact is we still have no evidence that he did any sort of revival of the program (leaving aside your speculations of the purpose of these programs) after the inspectors left in 1998.
Here is a story on the nuclear parts and plans that this scientist buried. Note a few facts: This very same scientist who dug up these parts said that they were buried back in 1991 and told them “that since '91 they hadn’t resurrected a nuclear weapon program.” As the article noted, “the assertion that Baghdad had revived its nuclear project was central to the Bush administration’s call for war early this year.” So, the very scientist who lead the U.S. to these buried parts has stated that Bush’s assertion is false. (Note also what he said about the claim that the purchase of the aluminum tubes was for centrifuges.)
The people you call “the usual suspects” are the ones who have had a consistent position over the past year. The weasels are the one who keep pointing to evidence as a smoking gun that falls far short of being so.
By the way, it is important to note that the only way we appear to have found out the full story on Obeidi is through the two experts on Iraq’s program who talked on their own. The Administration itself only gave us a selected account.
This is further evidence of how they are continuing to cherry-pick and selectively tell us what they find and shows us that essentially we still can’t believe our own government to give us a full accounting of the truth. If that doesn’t bother the freakin’ hell out of you, I would say you have a rather bizarre conception of democracy!
Bluesman was, and is, wrong.
Scott Ritter was right.
Centrifuges ? AFAIK, for all the ballyhoo, what was found was spare parts for 1 (one) centrifuge. Obviously, there may be more yet to be found. Then again,DOD’s Military Critical Technologies list states:
So let’s be generous and say that there are parts for, say, 50 other centrifuges out there. Apparently, they’d generate enough HEU to make a weapon in 400 years, give or take. Some might think that’s an acceptable risk.
The three infamous trailers of Doom, yes. Was it ever demonstrated that those were, in fact, mobile weapons labs and ever put online? Were any other mobile labs found ?
As for people “weaseling in advance”, this is what I posted May 29th, two weeks after the invasion and I’ll stand by it:
From that same thread, I’ll shamelessly steal a quote from minty green:
This bull will never be fully buried, it appears, but I’ll furnish this anyway:
The Left may have been uncertain, but apparently someone who was very much in a position to know was quite certain.