Why Commander in Chief Is Losing the War of 16 Words

[kskiska]

By Dan Balz and Walter Pincus

If President Bush's White House is known for anything, it was competence at delivering a disciplined message and deftness in dealing with bad news. That reputation has been badly damaged by the administration's clumsy efforts to explain how a statement based on disputed intelligence ended up in the president's State of the Union address.

How did the White House stumble so badly? There are a host of explanations, from White House officials, their allies outside the government and their opponents in the broader debate about whether the administration sought to manipulate evidence while building its case to go to war against Iraq.

But the dominant forces appear to have been the determination by White House officials to protect the president for using 16 questionable words about Iraq's attempts to buy uranium in Africa and a fierce effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to protect its reputation through bureaucratic infighting that has forced the president's advisers to repeatedly alter their initial version of events.

At several turns, when Bush might have taken responsibility for the language in his Jan. 28 address to the country, he and his top advisers resisted, claiming others -- particularly those in the intelligence community -- were responsible.

Asked again yesterday whether Bush should ultimately be held accountable for what he says, White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters, "Let's talk about what's most important. That's the war on terrorism, winning the war on terrorism. And the best way you do that is to go after the threats where they gather, not to let them come to our shore before it's too late."

more…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37481-2003Jul23.html?nav=hptop_ts

[Sagan]

1. Does Matalin ever NOT lie?

She would lie even if the truth would serve...

*snip*

Mary Matalin, a former Bush White House adviser, said, "It's impossible to have a consistent message when the facts keep changing. We forsook consistency for honesty, in an effort to be as forthcoming as possible in putting out new facts as they became available."

*snip*


How pathetic is THAT spin????

[Best_man23]

9. How Carville Sleeps in the Same Bed

With Matalin is wonder enough for me.

[BuckeFushe]

11. How Carville sleeps with Matalin, simple

Remember the old WB cartoons with the rooster and the wolf, the wolf always trying to eat the chickens, and the rooster always thwarting him? At the end of the cartoon, they always "punched out" at the end of the day and went home.

It's their jobs, like so many in Washington, there is no passion left, only duty.

[Jackpine Radical]

12. Carville is a left wing hack

just as much as Matalin is one on the right. Never trust either of them. They're working the same street, one on the left side & the other on the right.

Outside this country, Carville will consult to any thug who will pay him. Check out his track record in S. Am.

[tomp]

15. the carville matalin marriage is one very graphic example...

...of how little difference there is between dems and repubs. metaphorically speaking, the two parties DO sleep together.

[BeFree]

22. No, it is not ..

A good example of our parties. The Dems are light years ahead of the Radical Repubs. Light years being like worlds apart. We, being one of the party's in question, of course.

It is however, a good example of how the corrupt elite mislead the sheeple for a shiny little piece of metal, and a brief high from a whiff of gaseous power.

[PROGRESSIVE1]

20. Let's not think about that, O.K?

-

[DrBB]

13. Wow--superb pretzel logic. Adding that to my collection

That ranks just below Ari's statement that "It is up to those who say there aren't WMD in Iraq to tell us where they are."

Let's just pause and savor it for a moment.

"It's impossible to have a consistent message when the facts keep changing." Well, yes, Mary, but "facts keep changing" is an oxymoron. If they were facts, they wouldn't change, yes? But even putting that aside and accepting the loose, PR-flack definition of "facts" as "whatever claims are out there, some of them our own, that we're now trying to spin away or deny," it still doesn't say what you want it to. Really it translates as a simple tautology: "It is impossible to have a consistent message when you keep changing your story." Well that's certainly true, but nothing you mean to admit (even though you just did).

And then to follow up with this through-the-looking-glass conclusion: "We forsook consistency for honesty, in an effort to be as forthcoming as possible in putting out new facts as they became available"--superb!

Or as John Stewart so astutely puts it, "D'uh wha...?!"

Let's see, the fact that we keep changing our story is evidence for the story's veracity? Well, yes, Mary apparently thinks. For look what we have done: we have put out "new facts" everytime we have thought of some. That is what "honesty" means--"We couldn't exercise enough self-censorship to tell consistent stories"--i.e., "Whatever came into our heads, in our panic, we said," i.e., "We were being forthright."

At this point we have truly descended to the event horizon that separates right wingers from reality even in their own minds. We enter a world of unreality so disconnected from our own that we can only guess at what subcortical process has generated such an astonishingly beautiful piece of self-deceiving rhetoric. We are dealing now at the quantum level, as it were, in which the phenomenon can only be explained by cracking into the interior of a single, one-syllable word. On some deep level--through habitual lying--she has let go entirely of any connection between the word "fact" and its definition, "things that are objectively true," and thus given up her connection to fact itself! Truly these are post-modern politicians--even as they would denounce, W J Bennett-fashion, anything smacking of "post-modernism"! For not only has she given up "fact," she has also (always-already) not not given it up, since she wants the term to have both contradictory senses at once: "fact" as "whatever story we happen to be telling you at the moment," yet it must also convey "things that are true" to her audience or the whole utterance even as she presumably intends it would collapse into gibberish.

Which of course is what it is. Yet inside the sub-cortical, reflexive lie-machine that these right wing robots assume the term "mind" refers to, there is a self, Mary Matalin, going along thinking "There, now I've said something sensible!" This can only be explained through some such phenomenon as described above.

Putting on my pointy ears, greenish make-up, and adopting my best Leonard Nimoy voice, I can only say....

Fascinating....

[tomp]

16. great analysis. we need more critical parsing of such "statements".

add to it the whining overlay, "we're trying (read: lying) sooooo hard and you won't let up."

you seem to be quite good at this. i would encourage you to post such spin critiques whenever possible. america needs to learn these language tricks. call me crazy but i think there could be a book in something like this, along the lines of "the bush dyslexicon". i promise i'll buy it.

btw, loved the "subcortical" (read: reptilian) reference.

[Beetwasher]

17. That was terrific!

Bravo! Fascinating indeed...

[bluedem]

21. Pretty pathetic, when one listens to the GOP crow about how the

former administration, in 1998, also believed there were WMDs. Hey, Matalin, if facts change every 5 minutes, imagine how much changes in 5 years.

[whirlygigspin]

2. Happy Halloween!

"Let's talk about what's most important. That's the war on terrorism, winning the war on terrorism. And the best way you do that is to go after the threats where they gather, not to let them come to our shore before it's too late."

Boo! Boo! Boo!

The Terror Monster is gonna get YOU!

Run! Hide! Shoot anything in sight!

Boo! Boo! Boo!

Quick! Before it's too late!

Duck! & Cover!

Spookie! Bad! Evil! Monster!

Gonna get YOU!

[saigon68]

10. BUY ROLLS OF DUCT TAPE

It will protect you.

[Nottingham]

3. Liars and Liars to cover Liars! This isn't something ya sweep away

It was a Premptive War
It was a Huge Federal Deficit
It was Lives
It was American Credibility
Going down the tubes:bounce:

[Zero Gravitas]

8. Restore Honor and Dignity to the WHite House

by telling dishonorable undignfied lies.

[Ediacara]

4. what I don't understand

is when reporters are given this obvious dodge:

Asked again yesterday whether Bush should ultimately be held accountable for what he says, White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters, "Let's talk about what's most important. That's the war on terrorism, winning the war on terrorism. And the best way you do that is to go after the threats where they gather, not to let them come to our shore before it's too late."

Why doesn't the reporter interupt and say something like, "Mr. McClellan, can you please answer the question I asked you?"

Why don't they persue the question, rather than accept this BS as acceptable?

[w4rma]

5. economically right-wing (big buisness) news outlets are *protecting* Bush

But, they have to report enough to appear that they are reporting the news. More and more infotainment to use up time that would otherwise be used to report hard news.

[hang a left]

6. I Can't Wait Until

tomorrow. 9-11 report. "Ah, Mr Mc Clellan, yes, let's talk about what's important, let's talk about that war on terrorism, uh, where might that war be?"

[DoveTurnedHawk]

7. Reporters Have No Guts

Debates are even worse. I always want the Moderator to interrupt and say, "No, please answer the question I asked, not the question you wished I had asked."

DTH

[ewagner]

18. I think it was Nixon's press secretary

Ron Ziegler who once told the press

"Your questions are not responsive to my answers"

These guys are ten times worse than Ziegler

btw...great analysis...needs to be sent out to all major news organizations....

???????????? does anybody in this place have a mechanism for doing that????????????????/

[rocktivity]

14. I barely made it past the opening sentence

If President Bush's White House is known for anything, it was competence at delivering a disciplined message and deftness in dealing with bad news.

If President Bush's White House is known for anything, it was being disciplined about their incompetence and deftness in avoiding the reality of bad news!

rocknation

[yellowcanine]

19. "just 16 words" a bogus argument anyway

Since when does the number of words define the importance of a lie anyway? If a person speaks 5000 words and 16 of them are a lie does that make the lie any less of a lie? No. That kind of thinking is kind of like using the weight of a doctoral dissertation to determine whether the research and conclusions in it are valid. Furthermore - those 16 words weren't the only lie in the speech. There were lots of other statements about WMDs that were clearly exaggerations of existing intelligence, if not outright fabrications. Where I come from, telling somebody they exaggerate is just a kind way of telling them they are lying. My reading of all of the WMD arguments made by Bush, Rumsfield, AND Powell is that raw intelligence data was "cherry picked" for information that bolstered their argument, no matter how tenuous or outdated. Look at the arguments they used when challenged - Clinton said the same thing in 1998, etc - well Clinton also didn't use it to make the case for an invasion - and 1998 is 5 years ago - longer than the shelf life of most biological and chemical wmds (a misnomer anyway - the only true wmds are nuclear weapons - which we know now -and should have known then- Saddam was not getting any time soon).

[snippy]

23. It is not 16 words, it is1600 lies.

It is probably more than 1,600 lies if you count all the reiterations of all the lies by everyone in the administration but I like the 1600 reference to the White House.

The democrats need to get the focus on these four questions:

Who made the decision to use a series of lies to market the invasion of Iraq?

When was that decision made?

Why was that decision made?

Did that decision create a criminal conspiracy?

If the mainstream media starts asking these question then the next thing the democrats should focus on is the need for a special prosecutor.