Rightie Blogs: From Bush's Mouth To Your Ear
At TPM:
At TPM:
"Dan Bartlett, on the White House's use of right wing blogs:
I mean, talk about a direct IV into the vein of your support. It’s a very efficient way to communicate. They regurgitate exactly and put up on their blogs what you said to them. It is something that we’ve cultivated and have really tried to put quite a bit of focus on."Powerline: the Pravda of our time...
posted by Winston Smith at
7:30 PM
6 Comments:
You think they’re overcompensating.
Yes, I do. This issue of “Bush lied, people died”? It’s been the mantra for the last four years: “If only the right questions had been asked back then, we would have found out that he was lying to us.” That’s false—it’s patently false. There’s a difference between lying and being wrong. We were wrong. As were a lot of people and a lot of countries. We were wrong about the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. That’s far different from saying that we purposely manipulated or intentionally lied to the American people.
There's no sense in talking about this anymore, Tom. The evidence that they distorted the evidence is unusually clear, and available to everyone. There is no way in hell that I'm going to blame someone for an honest error. But this is so far from being an honest error that it's disrespectful to the country and to the constitution to continue to assert that that's what it is.
It's time to drop the partisanship. Seriously. You're a smart guy and a well-read guy. This is important. It is always possible to spin the evidence in a way that minimizes guilt. ALWAYS. All I can do is implore you--in the strongest possible terms--to abandon this hard-core, relentless effort to spin things in a pro-Bush direction. No rational, objective person could possible conclude that the administration's errors were primarily honest ones.
You simply cannot tell me that the recent NIE/Iran revelations have not given you pause. It's EXACTLY the same kind of dishonest, bellicose bullshit we endured in the lead-up to Iraq.
Yes, it is possible that the administration's mistakes were honest. But no, that's not the smart guess.
Hey, I figgered if you're gonna quote Bartlett, then let him have his say.
Actually, I already gave my thoughts on the NIE, NIEs obviously proven not to be infallible.
It was gonna get leaked, so they put it out. You think everything's OK with Iran now? That this changes anything?
This is the kind of stuff that got us into Iraq, and on which Bush's defenders thrive. Now that the evidence is clearly against them, they argue "hey, the evidence isn't INFALLIBLE!"
This, of course, is part of the recipe for doing what you want regardless of the evidence: when the evidence is fallible (as it almost always is), but in the direction you like, exaggerate it. When the evidence is fallible (as it almost always is) but in the direction you don't like, point out that it's fallible and therefore (?!?!?!?) should not be trusted.
Let me get away with this and I can always get what I want, even without patent lies.
Or the NIE was wrong, and believing that Saddam's decades-long fascination with WMDs hadn't abated was a reasonable position. [One that John Edwards had at the time.]
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and everything isn't reducible to heroes and villians.
How many times do you have to assert something before it becomes true?
I can't remember...
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home