Posted on 02/03/2004 9:31:27 PM PST by Dr. Marten
Gerard Jackson
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 2 February 2004
In keeping with the it's Leninist policy of publishing all the lies fit to print, the New York Times once again let the demented Maureen Dowd out of her cage. Seething with all the rage of a deserted harridan, Dowd regaled readers not with withering wit, of which she has little, or a profound grasp of foreign affairs, of which she has none, but the Democratic lie that President Bush lied and that he is an idiot. (Readers should note that all republican presidents are either evil [Nixon] or stupid [Reagan, Bush, etc])
According to her David Kay provided "an amazing image of the president and the dictator, both divorced from reality over weapons, glaring at each other from opposite sides of bizarre, paranoid universes where fiction trumped fact."
What ought to be amazing is that any paper of 'record' would publish such drivel. But since when has the NYT concerned itself with honesty or integrity. Even a casual reading of the Kay Report, which is available on the net, exposes Dowd's fulminations as nothing but a bitter perversion of the truth by a sour and politically frustrated hack masquerading as a columnist.
Dowd not only vindictively compares Bush to the sadistic Saddam, she claimed that bush only believed the intelligence reports on Saddam's WMDs because they "fitted what they wanted to hear." This is a vicious lie that David Kay himself put to rest when he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday, something that Dowd admitted. To be fair, and fairness is a vice to Dowd, I'll quote her in full:
"When Kay spoke these words on weapons of mass destruction — "It turns out we were all wrong, probably, in my judgement, and that is most disturbing" — the US and Iraq learnt that when you try too hard to control the picture of reality, you risk losing your grasp of it. In interviews, Kay defended the war with Iraq, saying that the US "has often entered the right war for the wrong reason," and he defended Bush, saying, "if anyone was abused by the intelligence, it was the President".
Kay also said that "dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002." Somehow Dowd missed this one. Perhaps she was out getting here claws sharpened.
What we have here is the dirty trick of misrepresenting a case (at least she didn't use elipses) by using selective quotes. In doing so she tries to convey the impression that Kay is excusing President for lying. This is another baseless attack on Bush that also impugns Kay's integrity. No honest person who read the Kay Report could support her vile assertions for a moment
Let's do this by the numbers, assuming that Dowd and her politically lobotomised admirers can count. If Bush only believed the intelligence he was given because it was what he "wanted to hear", how come Bill Clinton, Sandy Berger, Nancy Pelosi, Madeleine Albright, Lieberman, Kerry, and many others also believed it, along with European goverments?
It wasn't Bush who said: "Iraq is a long way from [here], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat " but Madeleine Albright.
It wasn't Bush who said: "There's no question that Saddam Hussein is a threat to the United States and to our allies" but Howard Dean
And it wasn't Republicans who wrote: "[W]e urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with the U.S. Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions … to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs" but Senators Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, and John Kerry.
It wasn't Bush who said: "There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years ... We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction" but Jay Rockefeller.
And it was Clinton, not Bush, who said: There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years ... We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction."
And it was also Clinton who said on Veterans Day 1998:
"A failure to respond could embolden Saddam to act recklessly, signaling to him that he can, with impunity, develop these weapons of mass destruction or threaten his neighbors... And it would permanently damage the credibility of the United Nations Security Council to act as a force for promoting international peace and security. We continue to hope — indeed, pray — that Saddam will comply, but we must be prepared to act if he does not."
No wonder Kay said: "Based on the intelligence that existed, I think it was reasonable to reach the conclusion that Iraq posed an imminent threat" and that Bush's decision to destroy Saddam's was "absolutely prudent." This is what led Kay to conclude that "the intelligence community owes the president [an apology] rather than the president owing [one to] the American people." The same intelligence that the Clinton mob also accepted as true.
So who does Dowd want to hold accountable? That right — Bush. Everything is his fault. In her bigoted eyes "he is skittering away from his claims about Iraqi weapons". Never mind that her pals in the Democratic Party also toed the same line. This is about good versus evil, meaning Dems versus Bush and the USA versus terrorism. What can I say, except — what a lying bitch!
But why was America's intelligence so bad? Maybe it had something to do with the actions of the Democratic-controlled Church and Pyke committees in the '70s which crippled US intelligence activities. (Incidentally, the motive force behind these committees was the pro-Soviet Institute of Policy Studies which, by chance, Senator Kerry has been closely associated with).
After losing WW I German persuaded themselves that they had not lost on the battlefield but had been stabbed in the back by sinister forces back home. But it is no myth that the US military is being stabbed in the back — and there's a name for that, Dowd. Unfortunately, I doubt if the hate filled Dowd's febrile brain would be able to make the connection.
But why does the Times tolerate Dowd's malicious fulminations? Simple: it agrees with them. This is the rag that published Duranty's Stalinst lies about the Soviet purges and the Ukrainian famine. The same paper published Harrison Salisbury's lies about Vietnam, even though they knew them to be slanders against the US military. It also published Wilfred Burchett knowing that he was a KGB agent who had helped North Korean thugs torture American, Australian and UK prisoners of war. Not only did the Times to publish these facts it also hid from its readers Burchett's communist background.
Could it get much worse. You betcha. Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger, current publisher of the Times, once told his father that if an American soldier came face-to-face with a North Vietnamese soldier "I would want to see the American guy get shot". Judging by his attitude toward Bush and Iraq, he hasn't changed his mind about wanting to see American soldiers get killed.
Dowd's foul screeds and Arthur Sulzberger's vile attitude only shows that one would find more integrity in a brothel than in the Times.
Gerard Jackson is Brookes' economics editor
I read that far and became a Gerard Jackson fan.
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