BUSH DIDN'T LIE -- State Of The Union Speech Redeemed!

http://www.iconoclast.ca/NewPage11.asp ^ | MARK STEYN

[BurkesLaw]

In other words, the British Government did learn that Saddam Hussein did seek significant quantities of uranium from Africa......

[BurkesLaw]

What other Bush "lies" will eventually be revealed as the truth. The Democrats hope that he will have been defeated by then.

[gunnygail]

If you listen closely, you can hear the libtard's a$$holes slamming shut all across the nation reading this!

[Mrs Zip]

ping

[cripplecreek]

"If you listen closely, you can hear the libtard's a$$holes slamming shut all across the nation reading this!"


LOL

SNAP!

[gov_bean_ counter]

IMHO...

The Dem strategy for the war in Iraq and WMD seems to have been to isolate the weakest of several intel sources for a given event and discredit it. They act as if the discredited source is the only source thus further attempting to discredit any action taken based on what they claim is the only source. Pretty close to setting up and knocking down straw men.

I think it is a strategy that will eventually bite the Dems in the rear.

[mudblood]

What bothers me is the Democrats' rabid willingness to attribute horrific lies to a sitting president. I don't know ANYONE in my real life who lies as much as they say Bush does. The very definition of "Evangelical Christian" begins with the words "Well, they don't lie". Bush didn't lie, he's not a liar, he loves his country and his countrymen. I'm sorry liberals, he simply doesn't want to kill 6 million jews, force your kids to pray to Jesus 5 times a day, nor give all your money to his rich friends from college.

[brewcrew]

As a wise man once said, they've achieved such a high pucker factor, you'd be hard pressed to drive a needle through there with a sledge hammer.

[cripplecreek]

To paraphrase Rosanne.

"You couldn't pull a needle out of their butts with a tractor."

[Blood of Tyrants]

All Rats lie and call others liars.

[comebacknewt]

We've got to make sure the word gets out. The campaign needs a catchphrase to offset the "Bush Lied" one that the left has used so successfully.

[Logic n' Reason]

Of course he didn't lie. I honestly don't think he knows how. If he tried, his tongue would snap off it's rollers.

And what a change our President is from the thing that somehow held the office before.

We better make damn sure we put this guy back to work for four more years! In fact - I'd like to see the Constitution amended to have Mr. Bush be able to win a third four year term.

[fella]

The DNC memo to ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN says that this story doesn't fit into the current agenda and suggests that pictures of prison abuse especially the ones with the panties on the head ones be reshuffled and shown tonight.

[BibChr]

Before the President's gushing over those "great parents," Bill and Hillary Clinton, I'd've said the same.

Dan

[blanknoone]

IF you're going to post a link, the least you could do is link to the article rather than link to another excerpt.

Steyn's Sun Times Column

[blanknoone]

Not sure if you missed this on your ping list or if I just didn't catch it. New to me...but it is a couple of days out of date.

[netmilsmom]

No matter how much Mark Steyn, in his own artful way, states this, no one is paying attention except us.

[plain talk]

I object to the title of this article and that we should even be defending whether our President lied or not about national security. The only issue is whether the intelligence was any good or not and has nothing to do with Bush.

[HenryLeeII]

Mr. Steyn flambays the fascist lefties again!

[norman4]

It might be more helpful to point to some actual journalism, instead of an op-ed piece.

Since I don't have a financial times subscription, I couldn't get the older story. But I got this suggesting the French would be the continental nation doing the watching; I've copied the entire FT article below.


MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA: Fake papers relating to uranium from Niger 'were offered for sale'
By Mark Huband, Security Correspondent, in London
Financial Times; Jul 13, 2004

Fake documents that are at the centre of a controversy surrounding alleged Iraqi attempts to procure uranium from Niger were offered to an Italian newspaper for €15,000 ($18,600, £10,000), a US congressional report on Iraq has revealed.

The documents were handed to the US embassy in Rome in October 2002 by an Italian journalist who asked US officials to verify their authenticity. The US passed them to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog, whose officials quickly discovered they were forgeries.

The original source of the documents isamystery, although it is known they were passed to the journalist by an Italian businessman who had served in Italy's armed forces.

The revelation that the businessman had offered to sell the documents, as well as details of the sum involved, is found in the 497-page US Senate intelligence committee report released last week, on the intelligence material used to support the case for war in Iraq.

The businessman has a criminal record for extortion in Italy, although European intelligence officials investigating the source said yesterday they were unaware of the sum demanded for the documents.

The exposure of the documents as fakes undermined a claim made by President George W. Bush that Iraq had sought to buy uranium and may have been trying to reconstitute its nuclear programme.

The UK government has stood by its claim that Iraq had sought to buy uranium, and its assertion is expected to be supported by an official inquiry headed by Lord Butler whose report is published tomorrow. The UK has made clear that its claim was not based on the evidence provided in the fake documents, and that it had other evidence that Iraq had tried to buy uranium.

The Senate report adds weight to these claims by detailing the extent to which French intelligence information supported that being gathered by other intelligence agencies. The French information was given particular weight because French companies control Niger's uranium output.
© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd

[jungleboy]

BUT, the DNC MEDIA will not let the public hear the truth.

I remember driving to work that morning... local radio stations were all over this, calling Bush the liar. Newpapers FRONT PAGE HEADLINES, every half-hour radio "news" updates repeating over and over and over this Lie.

DNC propaganda machine #1 enemy, imho.

[Pokey78]

Now we have links to links to linkd articles. Q flu is spreading like Syphilis in Bangkok.

Complete column

Do you remember a year ago when the Democratic National Committee was putting out press releases headlined "President Bush Deceives The American People"?

Yawn. What's new? But last summer the Bush Lie of the Week was all to do with Saddam's trying to buy uranium from Niger. CNN and co. replayed endlessly the critical 16 words from the president's 2003 State of the Union Address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Sixteen words that could break a presidency! Bush "misled every one of us," huffed Senator John Kerry. "It's beginning to sound like Watergate," said Governor Howard Dean. Joseph C. Wilson IV, the man the CIA sent to Africa to investigate, wrote a piece for The New York Times titled "What I Didn't Find in Africa."

Can you guess what he didn't find, dear reader? That's right, he didn't find a big package of uranium bearing the address label "S. Hussein, Suite 27, the Saddam Hussein Center for Armageddon Studies, Saddam Hussein Parkway, Baghdad."
Ambassador Wilson said relax, he'd been to Niger, spent "eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people," and there's nothing going on.

Well, last Friday in Washington, the Senate Intelligence Committee's report confirmed that both British and French intelligence had informed the US separately of Iraq's efforts in Niger (the country's uranium operations are under the supervision of the French Atomic Energy Commission) and that, despite his protestations to the contrary, even Joe Wilson had discovered evidence of Iraq-Niger contacts. Today in London, Lord Butler will publish his report into the quality of the intelligence on which rested Britain's case for going to war with Iraq. The report is said to be critical of some of Tony Blair's claims, supportive of others. And, among the latter, he says that the statements about Iraq and Niger are justified and supported by the intelligence.

In other words, the British government did learn that Saddam Hussein did seek significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

As a gazillion e-mails a day shrieked from my inbox back then, "BUSH LIED!!!!!!" So where exactly in that State of the Union observation is the lie? The only bona fide liar in this whole affair would seem to be the preening mediocrity Joseph C. Wilson IV, who lied to his New York Times readers about what he found in Africa and explicitly lied when he insisted that his wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame, was not the one who got him the gig. (He said she had nothing to do with it; the Senate investigation has uncovered her memo recommending him.)

Last summer, the comparatively minor matter of uranium from Niger was all over the front pages and the news shows. Do you think these latest developments will be? Will John Kerry and Howard Dean be eating humble yellowcake? Not to judge from The Washington Post, which buried its revised account of these events deep inside the paper, or The New York Times, which at the time of this writing has shown no interest in the exposure of its sometime pundit, Wilson, as a complete fraud.

I FIRST wrote about this business in July last year. The CIA had disowned the Niger story, and I pointed out that these were the same fellows who'd botched the Sudanese aspirin factory bombing, failed to spot 9/11 coming, etc, etc. "So," I continued, "if you're the president and the same intelligence bureaucrats who got all the above wrong, say the Brits are way off the mark, there's nothing going on with Saddam and Africa, what do you do? Do you say, 'Hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day'? Or, given what you've learnt about the state of your humint (human intelligence), is it likely they've got much of a clue about what's going on in French Africa? Isn't this one of those deals where the Brits and the shifty French are more plugged in?"

And so it's proved. The fact is almost every European intelligence service reckoned Saddam was trying to buy uranium in Africa. The only folks who didn't think so were the CIA.

Let's weigh their comparative interest in the story. The Financial Times revealed last week that one continental intelligence agency had had a uranium-smuggling operation involving Iraq under surveillance for three years. In return, the only primary investigation initiated by the most powerful nation on the face of the Earth was to send a narcissistic kook from a Saudi-funded think tank on vacation for a week to sip mint tea with government stooges. Joe Wilson declared he didn't even bother filing a written report, and the "Bush spurned my advice!" column he wrote for The New York Times reads like a bad travelogue: "Through the haze, I could see camel caravans crossing the Niger river."

After that, the great narcissist took to the talk-show circuit and somehow managed to make himself the center of the story – But hey, enough about Saddam's nuclear ambitions; let's talk about me.

A few weeks before 9/11, Reuel Marc Gerecht wrote a timely piece in The Atlantic Monthly on the woeful state of US counter-terrorism intelligence in a CIA neutered by politically correct bureaucracy. Among Gerecht's many memorable quotes was this line from a young CIA man reflecting on an agency grown used to desk-bound life in Virginia: "Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen." That's Niger in a nutshell: Diarrhea Central. Who'd want to be stationed there when they could be back at Langley monitoring the world's e-mail in an air-conditioned office?

But Niger is a 99.5% Sunni Muslim country with a load of uranium. It's exactly the sort of place an intelligence agency in the war on terror ought to be keeping an eye on. And that doesn't mean sending Mint Tea Boy to write it up for the travel section.

That's the issue here: The CIA are tourists in the heart of darkness.

Bush didn't lie! He was right, and the CIA were wrong. That doesn't mean they lied, either. Intelligence is never 100%. You make a judgment, and in this instance the judgments of the British and Europeans were correct, and the judgment of the principal intelligence agency of the world's hyperpower was way off. Something is badly awry at the CIA, and that should be a cause of great concern – for all Americans.

National security shouldn't be a Republican/Democrat thing. But it's become one because, for too many Americans, when it's a choice between Bush and anybody else, they'll take anybody else. So, in Fahrenheit 9/11, if it's a choice between Bush and Saddam, Michael Moore comes down on the side of the genocidal whacko and shows us lyrical slo-mo shots of kiddies flying kites in a Ba'athist utopia. In the Afghan war, if it's a choice between Bush and the women-enslaving Taliban, Susan Sarandon and co. side with the Taliban.

And in the most exquisite reductio of this now universal rule, if it's a choice between Bush and the CIA, the Left sides with the CIA. There's one for the peace marches: Hey, hey, CIA/How many Bush lies did you expose today? This isn't an anti-war movement. This is a movement in denial.

[Sloth]

The SOTU didn't need any redemption. There's never been even the tiniest shred of evidence that it was inaccurate.

[Sloth]

The forged memo that started it all:

[secret garden]

Thank you Pokey!

[The KG9 Kid]

As always, thanks for both the ping and non-excerpted post.

[Samwise]

Will someone please ping me when the Democrats apologize for calling the President a liar?

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Thank you very much!!!

[proud American in Canada]

"Now we have links to links to linkd articles. Q flu is spreading like Syphilis in Bangkok."

LOL. Thanks for posting the whole article. :)

[proud American in Canada]

Re #23: LOL! I just love the "heart" dotting the i in Hussein.

He probably alternates with smiley faces. ;)

[hattend]

Thanks for the whole article

BTTT

[Jorge]

The only people who accused Bush of lying in the first place were those who never cared about the truth anyway.

The only thing this new info will do is confirm what slandering liars they have always been.

[arasina]

If you listen closely, you can hear the libtard's a$$holes slamming shut all across the nation reading this!

ROFL! Just what we need...constipated libtards.

[SquirrelKing]

But Niger is a 99.5% Sunni Muslim country with a load of uranium. It's exactly the sort of place an intelligence agency in the war on terror ought to be keeping an eye on. And that doesn't mean sending Mint Tea Boy to write it up for the travel section.

Hee Hee! Mint Tea Boy!

[WarrenC]

Your distinction between 'actual journalism' and an 'op-ed piece' is a non-starter. There is more 'actual journalism' in the typical Mark Steyn column than in any twenty 'straight news' articles from the 'main stream' sources.

You may believe there is no editorial input to the coverage of the news by these sources, but there is a lot -- both in the stories they choose to report and in the way they report them.

[irv]

Do you remember a year ago when the Democratic National Committee was putting out press releases headlined "President Bush Deceives The American People"?

Yes. Things were a lot more civil in those days ...

[moonhawk]

"...Things were a lot more civil in those days ..."

Great line!

[expatguy]

You would be surprised to see how amateur and in many cases nonexistant our country's overseas intelligence network is.

99% of it is outsourced.

[Joe_October]

Rats Lied Bump Again (and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again).

[lainde]

bump and thanks!

[Steve0113]

I don't know ANYONE in my real life who lies as much as they say Bush does.

Neither do I, but apparently the Rats do; or else they wouldn't find it plausible that Bush would lie that much.

[Eva]

The "Bush Lied" story was the work of campaign dirty trickster, Chris Lehane, while working for the John Kerry campaign. So now it's Kerry who lied (since Lehane was working for him). Let's start an e-mail campaign demanding that John Kerry issue an apology for shopping the story to all the media.

[votelife]

bttt

[votelife]

bttt

[votelife]

this info needs to get out more...

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

As a wise man once said, they've achieved such a high pucker factor, you'd be hard pressed to drive a needle through there with a sledge hammer.

They should take advantage of that physiological condition and make some money with it.
It involves a lump of coal and a tube of K•Y Jelly.

[brewcrew]

Holy schnikeys! A year and a half later? How did you come across that?

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Hee hee...I didn't even look at the dates.

"votelife" bumped the thread today at post #44...I saw it at the top of the list...clicked on it and started reading. I saw your comment and just had to throw in my 2 cents.