Webs of Illusion

[MSgt213]

It's understood that incumbents campaigning for re-election will spotlight the good news and downplay the bad. The problem for President Bush, with the election just three weeks away, is that the bad news keeps cascading in and there is very little good news to tout.

So the president and his chief supporters have resorted to the odd tactic of claiming that the bad news is good.

The double talk reached a fever pitch last week after the release of two devastating reports - the comprehensive report by Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector, which destroyed any remaining doubts that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; and the Labor Department's dismal employment report for September, which heightened concerns about the strength of the economic recovery and left Mr. Bush with the dubious distinction of being the first president since Herbert Hoover to stand for re-election with fewer people working than at the beginning of his term.

Mr. Bush turned the findings of the Duelfer report upside down and inside out, telling crowds at campaign rallies that it proved Saddam Hussein had been "a gathering threat." It didn't matter that the report, ordered by the president himself, showed just the opposite. The truth would not have been helpful to the president. So with a brazenness and sleight of hand usually associated with three-card-monte players, he pulled a fast one on his cheering listeners.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/opinion/11herbert.html?oref=login

[teryang]

1. The repukes on the Senate Armed Services Committee

Turned the report upside down as well.

McCain's performance was something else.

100 percent of all intelligence reports agreed he had weapons of mass destruction, right?

Duelfer: yes, we thought he would be crazy if he didn't have them. I didn't think he had them but I thought he might have a reserve of materials but not assembled for a deterrent.

Later on Duelfer says: I wasn't in the intelligence community at the time.

Duelfer also gave endorsed this confusing speculative tautology:

The inspections were going to fail because they couldn't be maintained under the pressure coming from the United States, so therefore, Saddam would have been free to proceed with programs to obtain weapons of mass destruction.

The sanctions were eroding and losing their effectiveness because there was increasing efforts of the international community to avoid them.

Hey, for nine hundred million dollars and my own personal empire, I'll throw you a bone. But that's my personal opinion, that's not what's in the report.

[Moderator]

2. Locking as duplicate

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