Thursday, December 15, 2005

Faux Mea Culpa

Sincerity is all that counts. It's a wide-spread modern heresy. Think again. Bolsheviks are sincere. Fascists are sincere. Lunatics are sincere. People who believe the earth is flat are sincere. They can't all be right.
Tom Driberg (1905 - 1976), British politician and journalist

What did he know and when did he know it?

If it is widely known now by the public that Bush used bad info, then he obviously knew a long time ago. If he is truly taking responsibility then it is time to clean house and get rid of a vice president a defense secretary that steamed roll over evidence and expert advice to push forward a failed plan, but he is not.

This is a clear case of a public relations stunt to raise his poll numbers so his gang can get odious legislation passed.

The white house gang knows that celebrities are forgiven for their trespasses of drugs, prostitutes and old girlfriends and boyfriends, so they are looking for their absolution. The American people will be foolish to approve anything more from this gang.

From Frank Rice’s Nov. 27th column in the New York Times
...There is more going on here than politics.

Much more: each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren't, in Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless. The more the president and vice president tell us that their mistakes were merely innocent byproducts of the same bad intelligence seen by everyone else in the world, the more we learn that this was not so. The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House. The real point of the Bush-Cheney verbal fisticuffs this month, like the earlier campaign to take down Joseph Wilson, is less to smite Democrats than to cover up wrongdoing in the executive branch between 9/11 and shock and awe.

The cover-up is failing, however. No matter how much the president and vice president raise their decibel levels, the truth keeps roaring out. A nearly 7,000-word investigation in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times found that Mr. Bush and his aides had ''issued increasingly dire warnings'' about Iraq's mobile biological weapons labs long after U.S. intelligence authorities were told by Germany's Federal Intelligence Service that the principal source for these warnings, an Iraqi defector in German custody code-named Curveball, ''never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.'' The five senior German intelligence officials who spoke to The Times said they were aghast that such long-discredited misinformation from a suspected fabricator turned up in Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations and in the president's 2003 State of the Union address (where it shared billing with the equally bogus 16 words about Saddam's fictitious African uranium).

Be afraid, be very very afraid.

6 comments:

The Misanthrope said...

Andrea, in case I was not clear enough, his insincere confession is just a way to raise poll numbers.

Frankly, this has opened a new can of worms as it relates to war planning, destabilizing of the Middle East, the red ink in our budget, and most importantly the loss of lives. Not Iran becomes a major player in the Middle East and will look to Iraq as an ally.

theBhc said...

misanthrope's a smart guy, if that is not clear enough, and anyone critical of this administration is well aware of the fact that all this administration concerns itself with, domestically, is PR.

As I've said before, they do not concern themselves with actually doing anything well, or even correcting bad policy that is known to be bad, but only with spin designed -- with a notable decreasing national credibility -- to make the public think they're doing well. This is not a useful activity for government to be involved with. But that what this country has for government right now.

Can you name one thing Bush has actually done? other than zipping around the country giving speeches to prop up his poll numbers? Because I sure can't. In fact, that seems to be the only thing this guy does now.

[misanthrope: hey, thanks for the bump to your "what we read" section. I feel ... promoted.]

Chandira said...

Bush's confession stinks, doesn't it? A bit like the rest of the Whitehouse right now. I wasn't fooled. I don't think many people were. Let's hope not, anyway..

B2 said...

I'm not going to plug the t-shirt shop I have on CafePress, but I want to acknowledge that my biggest seller of late has been an anti-Bush shirt that says "Dayenu" (it means "enough" in Hebrew) -- even those folks who used to think he was at least doing OK have begun to realize that he's in over his head, and has put all us all under water with him.

Janet said...

How about his allegedly saying that the Constitution is just a Goddamn piece of paper? I don't know if you mentioned that one before.

The Misanthrope said...

Janet, I did a Nexis search on that comment, but I did not find anything. However, it certainly doesn't sound out of character for either Bush or Cheney.