‘Devastating’ Moyers Probe of Press and Iraq Coming
At the close, Moyers mentions some of the chief proponents of the war who refused to speak to him for this program, including Thomas Friedman, Bill Kristol, Roger Ailes, Charles Krauthammer, Judith Miller, and William Safire.
Mostly because they know Moyers is a disgusting, leftwing hack propagandist, and they don’t wish to enable him by appearing on his Goebbellian exercise so their words can be twisted.
But Dan Rather, the former CBS anchor, admits, “I don’t think there is any excuse for, you know, my performance and the performance of the press in general in the roll up to the war…We didn’t dig enough. And we shouldn’t have been fooled in this way.”
Right. The guy disgraced by his own failed leftwing propaganda effort probably regrets he wasn’t able to gin up some more phony evidence in time to derail the Iraqi invasion.
Submit to Stumbled Upon!
I’m left with the conclusion that D. Rather is mentally ill.
Wait, so the left-wing was responsible for the propaganda before the invasion? I’m guessing you didn’t watch the show. To call Moyers a hack when he presented a well-documented argument proving how wrong all the right-wing hacks were, and then to compare HIM to Goebbels . . . Wow. You’ve got balls, dude.
I’ve got brains, too, you boob. Unfortunately, any you might have have been thoroughly washed by left-wing “well-documented” fantasies.
The first time I have ever seen the name “Shakespeare” uttering the word “dude.” Talk about balls.
Yes, Mr. Quick, it’s wonderful how you follow up the “I’ve got brains” comment with the utterly incomprehensible sentence, “Unfortunately, any you might have have been thoroughly washed by left-wing “well-documented” fantasies.” May I suggest reading your “typing” out loud before you hit post? I feel so clean after my thorough washing!
And for your friend there, Shakespeare is my given surname. Where did they find you, Nemo? For the record, William Shakespeare wrote in the common parlance of his day, and were he around today, the word “dude” would certainly appear in his work.
Enough of the old ad hominem; how ’bout we get back to the facts?
I defy you to objectively, factually refute the fact that Bush, Inc engaged in a massive PR campaign of deception that manufactured consent for the invasion of Iraq. The MSM, despite the constant tag of “liberal bias,” was complicit in repeating the lies without much digging at all.
Them’s the facts, so spin them all you want. You’re wrong.
Nah, I don’t want to get back to the “facts,” especially when they are opinions. Shakespeare today would have been as likely as Tom Stoppard or David Mamet to use the word “dude” as a form of address. Dignity, you know, and respect for the language, not to mention the fear of being mistaken for a midcult cretin.
How ’bout a little Clinton from Dec 16 1998
“Saddam (Hussein) must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons”
“Their mission is to attack Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors”
“The best way to end that threat once and for all is with a new Iraqi government — a government ready to live in peace with its neighbors, a government that respects the rights of its people”
Clinton upon signing the “The Iraq Liberation Act” Oct 1 1998:
“The United States favors an Iraq that offers its people freedom at home. I categorically reject arguments that this is unattainable due to Iraq’s history or its ethnic or sectarian make-up. Iraqis deserve and desire freedom like everyone else. The United States looks forward to a democratically supported regime that would permit us to enter into a dialogue leading to the reintegration of Iraq into normal international life.”
If it was deception, then we were deceived by Clinton as well, along with Kerry, Reid, Pelosi, and almost every single leader in the democratic party.
Shakespeare my ass.
I can’t help wondering what the “JC” stands for. You don’t suppose…
Jiminy Cricket?
Barry, I don’t doubt for a second that this whole charade started with Clinton. War these days is solely about corporate profit, and Lord knows Clinton had no aversion to helping the rich get richer. But to compare three statements Clinton made to the massive campaign launched by Bush, Inc, based on the word of con man Chalabi, is ludicrous. But I have the feeling if I was waiting for you guys to watch the Moyers show and factually refute anything that he says, I’d be waiting a long time. It’s easy to dismiss an argument you can’t win by just saying, “everything you say is opinion.”
As for you, Nemo, my mini-finned friend, “Fellow I know thee. I know thee for a knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deni’st the least syllable of thy addition.”
Can any of you pinheads name the play?
Later,
Johnny Cash Shakespeare
Clinton started the charade finished up by Bush? Then 9-11, which came along mid development, was just corporate good luck? Or was that a WH plot?
King Lear.
Tom,
Good job on the King Lear; I take back the pinhead remark.
Please note that I never claimed Clinton started the charade; I just said I wouldn’t doubt it.
If you guys will forgive a lengthy quote, this touches on many of the points I’m trying to make in this thread. If you won’t forgive it, then please read The Best War Ever by Rampton & Stauber. It’s chock full of FACTS about Bush, Inc’s PR game. From pp. 103-104:
What happened between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq was that Bush Inc mushroomed the bogus information from Chalabi into the “smoking gun that might come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” In other words, m’boys, we were hornswoggled.
Which, of course, then explains why CIA and State then effectively tried to murder their good friend and accomplice Chalabi. I’ve read the explanation in the lefty swamps: a falling out among crooks, and the Bushes trying to destroy the evidence. It’s as meaningless as most of the rest of what you contend is “factual.”
Christopher Hitchens makes a nearly irrefutable case that folks like you are dumb and gullible about your whole Chalabi fever dream.
I think he’s giving you far too much credit for intelligence.
Yea, but better would be when hell freezes over. Why on earth would any sane person listen to the ravings of a lunatic? I suppose there *might* be something truthful, but he has an agenda and he will say anything, the truth be damned. I would as soon go to the local sanitorium for “facts”.
I just listed a small sample of Clinton. I could go on and on with statements made by democrats prior to Bush taking office. I don’t have the time or inclination to waste on you.
You said “…Bush, Inc engaged in a massive PR campaign of deception…”. Massive PR, sure. Deception, no. You list the deceptions and I’ll shoot them down one by one.
1)”Irrefutable proof” that Saddam had nuclear weapons.
2) Link between Saddam and al-Qaeda.
3) Link between Saddam and 9/11.
Wasn’t the whole point of the invasion to “disarm Saddam?” Sort of like a high-school linebacker “disarming” a fifth-grader of a slingshot.
“Time and inclination,” eh? You sound like my pompous ass 11th grade English teacher, Mr. Nielsen.
And Quick, I read a few pages of your porn novel on Lulu. I can’t tell what gave you a bigger woodie — writing about a blowjob or blowing up a character loosely based on Bill Clinton.
You said (and I quote)
Then, a minute later, when it’s convenient,
You didn’t “claim” it, someone else did and you “didn’t doubt” its truth, so apparently you have the right (or what?) to ignore the consequences of the truth?
If that’s logic as you see it, I (in my turn), do not doubt that you can concoct conclusions out of thin air.
Earlier, you wrote
That’s a nice concoction - that the burden is on those who do not believe your ‘fact’. With logic, the way those who can actually reason see it, it is up to you to prove the claimed ‘fact’.
Please - your quotations are fun but the other stuff is painful. Stick to quotations from literature.
Quick, did you read the comments under that piece of poop Hitchens article? They’ve already ripped it to shreds, which saves me a bit of work.
Just because Hitchens says Congress is dumb and gullible doesn’t mean that I am.
Actually, you are.
Of course, just as I would suspect, you make up the deceptions.
1) Bush never claimed “irrefutable proof” of nuclear weapons. Try showing some substance rather than made up BS like your hero, Moyers.
2) Abdul Rahman Yasin, an indicted conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was given sanctuary by Saddam Hussein. He is not mentioned in the 9-11 Report, although he was associated with KSM member Ramzi Yousef.
Ahmad Hikmat Shakir, an Iraqi arrested in Doha on 9-17-2001, had documents in his possession linking him to the 1993 World Trade Center attack, KSM’s 1994 Bojinko plot, and KSM’s brother Zahid. He also had assisted two 9-11 hijackers — Khalid al Midhar and Nawaz al Hamzi– when they arrived in Malaysia for a planning session in January 2000. Like Yasin, Shakir was given sanctuary by Saddam Hussein in Iraq (after his release in 2001)
Why did Iraq provide this safe havens to Yasin and Shakir?
In 1994 or 1995, according to the 9-11 Commission , “Bin Ladin himself met with a senior Iraq intelligence official in Khartoum” to ask for weapon and logistical assistance from Iraq. This meeting occurred just prior to the KSM crime family offering services to Bin Laden. If assistance was rendered, when was the arrangement ended?
In 1999, at the time that the KSM group was planning for the second attack on the World Trade Center, the 9-11 Commission reported that “Iraqi officials offered Bin Laden a safe haven in Iraq.” Was this sanctuary offer part of a collaborative relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda?
All plagerized from Edward Jay Epstein
3) No such claim was ever made.
You are a liar of the worst kind.
Thanks, Bare, you’re right, I misspoke in some of my claims. I was shooting from the hip. While Bush never claimed irrefutable proof of nuclear weapons, his boys did claim evidence of WMD (Rumsfeld even said he knew where they were) and Bush did go out of his way to make it seem like a mushroom cloud was just over the horizon.
With all due respect to Edward Jay Epstein, there’s plenty of contradictory evidence to his claims:
My Talking Points are Better Than Your Talking Points
And as for the last claim, that Saddam was linked to 9/11, you’re right, Bush never made the claim. But when a recent (September 2006) Zogby Poll shows that 46% of respondents (and 65% of GOP respondents!) believe that such a link existed, then it doesn’t matter if they actually made the claim or not, because apparently a large percentage of the American populace is indeed dumb and gullible.
So you were right, I was wrong. That doesn’t change the nature of reality, which is the universe where Bush is NOT Superman, cleaning up all the evil in the world, but is in fact pursuing an agenda for all his moneymaking friends who are putting profits over lives on a horrendous scale.
Now, as much as I’ve enjoyed my pissing contest with you boys, and some of you are quite funny and clearly bright fellows, I can’t help you if you can’t see reality. I’ll drop in from time to time for a slapfight, but too much time in your Upside-Down World makes me a tad nauseated.
Spank.
Folks, some of you may be disappointed that I didn’t roll out the heavy artillery against this dumbass, but he (she? it?) is a perfect example of why I don’t bother any more.
Once upon a time, I used to presume good faith on the part of loons like this, but after more than five years of blogging, and close to a decade in their Usenet fever swamps, I know better.
You can bury them in sweet reason, pile facts and cites higher then the mountains, debate until you turn blue in the face, and in the end, you might as well be trying to convince the average Islamist barbarian savage that Allah didn’t command him to personally slaughter as many infidels as possible.
These folks may present what appears to be a sheen of intelligence, but they are prime examples of Hoffer’s True Believers.
Therefore, since no matter how high their nominal intelligence may be, they are in effect brainwashed religious fanatics with real IQs somewhat lower than a box of wet hair, I don’t bother arguing with them much any more, because nothing can convince a fanatic - not argument, not reality, nothing. My default position with them for a long time now has been to note that they are moronic moonbats, and to invite them to bark for me.
Invariably, they do, to the enjoyment and delight of all rational folks watching the show.
I can’t help you if you can’t see reality.
I love how anyone making this argument, and I think I’ve seen it used by slavering, googly eyed, proponents of every extreme position, doesn’t explore it to it’s logical conclusion.
It’s a delicious sythesis of:
1)Claims to have a grasp on reality and reason
2)Claims to have easy access to observations of reality that noone else seems to have
3)The functional equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb on Occam’s Razor, and claiming it’s everyone else who’s crazy.
And they never realize it.
Oh, this is a very bad place to ask that question. And an even worse place to try to “play with mamets or tilt with lips.”
More than a little of the Glendower in you, I see. Much noise, many claims, but in the end — just a pompous windbag.
“Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell.”
You have no talking points. You use a website that says “fact”, then uses a NY times or LA times story as its reference. No reference to documents required when the NY times says it’s so. The NY times has consistently slanted the story or just made up the story to fit their agenda.
You said Bush was “…engaged in a massive PR campaign of deception”. You are wrong. But if you search long enough you will find something that someone was mistaken about, or some intelligence that turned out untrue.
If you read this site a little more, you would discover this isn’t a Bush cheerleader zone, far from it. The fact that most of the contributors and commentors are not Bush cheerleaders does not mean we will swallow the BS that eminates from the left, yours included.
Your last comment illustrates how deluded you are:
Bush has screwed this up from the start to where it is now, but profit as a motive is, well, just more left wing BS you cannot support.
One final thought:
Who can? Plato doubted it. Coleridge and Wallace Stevens said it was impossible. Nick Taleb says that at least he realizes he can’t see “reality.” Rashamon. “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”
No wonder he’s “a tad nauseated.” He doesn’t realize that he’s spinning like a top.