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Originally posted by Spanky
You can't have intelligent conversation about politics because you confuse facts with opnions, especially opinions spouted off in the NYT and the Washington Post.
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Spanky, if you are going to reject the views of -- for example -- Duelfer then you are living in a world with no facts, only opinions. It is a fact that Duelfer testified before Congress and said certain things. It is a fact that he based his testimony on considerable work by the U.S. government. If you are going dismiss those facts because they were reported in the Washington Post and because the Washington Post sometimes runs opinions, then your views are no longer reality-based.
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I have many friends that work for high placed Democrats in Washington, and believe it or not, I even have friends that are high placed Democrats . . . .
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So: New York Times and Washington Post are not credible, but anonymous Democrat friends quoted on a chatboard are. Got it.
And you have Democratic friends but would not vote for a Democrat running against Pombo? What's up with that?
Hypothetically speaking, a "high-placed" Democratic in D.C. these days is what? An office-building window-washer?
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. . . . and they all admit behind closed doors that the "Bush lied" thing is just a political smoke screen. They all know that no one was more surprized by the lack of WMDs than the Bush admininstration. It was also conventional wisdom that the sanctions were not working Saddam was developing WMDs and there was nothing the administration could do about. But even though they know that, the lack of finding WMDs was just a political opportunity they couldn't pass up. But unlike them ( and like with CAFTA) you can't separate the substantive arguments from the political posturing.
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(1) This conversation started (on my end) because I thought you were accusing Clinton of lying, not Bush.
(2) If you want to have a real conversation about whether Bush lied, you have to look at what he was being told and what he said. Although you get hints of that from the better newspapers, and maybe even from your Democratic pals in D.C., you're going to learn more from books with inside sources -- e.g., Woodward's books, or Suskinds.
(3) If you read those books, you will see that the admininstration consistently has misled people.
Here is one example;
here is another.
(4) I do not believe that Bush or anyone else in his administration thought there were no WMD in Iraq but said there were.
(5) I think that a decision was made to invade Iraq -- not irrevocably, but presumptively -- and then the administration's work shifted towards making a public case and building public and international support. To this end, they stressed the WMD angle, not because it was the most important to them necessarily, but because it worked the best. (Wolfowitz basically said this a few years ago.) In making the public case, they presented as facts things they did not know to be facts. They were reckless with the truth, gambling that events would prove them right.
(5)(a) A couple of posts ago, you were all over me for referring to a Washington Post news article about Charles Duelfer's congressional testimony about the search for WMD as "fact." Why don't we apply the chatboard evidentiary standards to our political leaders? Bush and those working for him said a lot more based on a lot less, and yet you apparently will not admit that he crossed the line.
(6) In contemporary politics, a more complicated idea like "Bush was reckless with the truth" gets simplified to "Bush lied." You could blame the politicians for this, but I also would blame the media, which fails to give sustained attention to communicating anything with nuance, or to sort things out for the public when politicians make competing claims, and the public, which doesn't demand more.
