Posted on 10/27/2004 2:56:18 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
WAS THE STORY about the missing explosives in Iraq the "October surprise" that everyone's been waiting for?
It turns out that CBS News was planning to air the blockbuster story on "60 Minutes" on Sunday night, Oct. 31 - just two days before the election - in a move that could have had a similar impact to the last-weekend revelation in 2000 about President Bush's 1970s drunken driving arrest.
Jeff Fager, executive producer of the Sunday edition of "60 Minutes," told the Los Angeles Times in a statement that "our plan was to run the story on [Oct.] 31, but it became clear that it wouldn't hold, so the decision was made for the [New York] Times to run it."
The news that a whopping 380 tons of deadly explosives was removed from a facility south of Baghdad - either during the spring 2003 invasion or sometime afterward - has still roiled the race for the White House, with John Kerry accusing President Bush of incompetence.
The New York Times, along with a publication called the Nelson Report and blogger Josh Marshall, broke the story this past Sunday night - ruining CBS's pre-election scoop.
But some questioned why CBS News - already under fire for airing a story about gaps in Bush's National Guard service that was based on allegedly forged documents - would air such an inflammatory story so close to the election. The questions are loudest from the White House.
"Darn, I wanted to see the forged documents to show how this was somehow covered up," a senior Bush administration told the online Drudge Report.
Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff who was in Philadelphia yesterday, said, "When I first saw the story I said, I don't think this is a real story because it is nothing that I have seen in the context of job working at the White House... I think the weapons were gone before the U.S. troops arrived."
Was W. Wired? - update
A mainstream journalist finally got up the nerve to ask President Bush the question that Internet bloggers have been asking for a couple of weeks.
"Final question. What the hell was that on your back, in the first debate?," asked ABC's Charlie Gibson, brandishing a picture of the rectangular bulge under the president's suit jacket.
In a very un-Harry Truman-like move, Bush passed the buck somewhere else. "I'm embarrassed to say it's a poorly tailored shirt," he said. But Gibson pressed whether it was an electronic device of some type.
"How does an electrical - please explain to me how it works so maybe if I were ever to debate again I could figure it out," Bush said. "I guess the assumption was that if I was straying off course they would, kind of like a hunting dog, they would punch a buzzer and I would jerk back into place. I - it's just absurd."
Block the Vote in Fla.
BBC investigative journalist Greg Palast is reporting that a secret document obtained from inside Bush campaign headquarters in Florida suggests a plan to disrupt voting in the state's African-American voting districts.
E-mails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign's national research director in Washington, D.C., contain a 15-page list of 1,886 names and addresses of voters in predominantly black areas of Jacksonville.
An elections supervisor in Tallahassee, when shown the list, told Newsnight: "The only possible reason why they would keep such a thing is to challenge voters on Election Day."
Quote
"We're lazy. We're really, really lazy. First of all, we're cowards because we are afraid of being not objective. We're also just lazy. There may be two reporters in the country who understand tax policy. The rest of us are talking to our friends and reading each other in the paper." - William Saletan, Slate.com political writer, speaking of his colleagues
Media Shamelessly Shilling for Kerry and Kerry Brazenly Lying***...It is interesting that neither Kerry nor the Times mention that U.S. forces have secured more than 400,000 tons of explosives in Iraq – making the missing 380 tons less than 1/10th of 1% of the explosives U.S. forces have found and are destroying in Iraq. ...***
Hillary could have used one of these on Clinton.
"Final question. What the hell was that on your back, in the first debate?," asked ABC's Charlie Gibson, brandishing a picture of the rectangular bulge under the president's suit jacket.
In a very un-Harry Truman-like move, Bush passed the buck somewhere else. "I'm embarrassed to say it's a poorly tailored shirt," he said. But Gibson pressed whether it was an electronic device of some type.
"How does an electrical - please explain to me how it works so maybe if I were ever to debate again I could figure it out," Bush said. "I guess the assumption was that if I was straying off course they would, kind of like a hunting dog, they would punch a buzzer and I would jerk back into place. I - it's just absurd."
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Finally! W comes clean! Although I personally thought it was a more sophisticated device connected to his CNS that actually controlled him directly... yeah.
They have no shame...They will manage to slither along.
And I think it will also fail.
Probably Abu Grab, coming out Sunday night.
GW wearing a wire is a desperate as it gets...the media said he LOST the first debate...IF he were wired he'd have done 10 times better at the very least. Maybe GW should "fire" this imagainary answer feeder.
If the campaign was going to go for another month, I shudder to think of the crazy stuff they'd pull out of the hat.
"Maybe GW should "fire" this imagainary answer feeder."
Well, I imagine that I have it on good imaginary authority that GW has already imagined firing him.
"A similar impact to the last-weekend revelation in 2000 about President Bush's 1970s drunken driving arrest..."
In other words, little or none at all?
One? One per day at this rate. Monday it was the phony explosives story. Yesterday it was the AP with a phony National Guard story. I'm waiting for the phony drug story and a resurrection of the DUI story. That's two more days, leaving four till election day. At least one of the four will be a major Halliburton hit piece. Down to three. What can they do for those three days? Re-run the James Byrd dragging commercial? Oh wait, they'll remind people about Neil Bush and Silverado. Yeah, that's the ticket.
What part of plummeting ratings is SeeBS, Dan Blather and Andrew Heyward not getting? They have been exposed as frauds but, I guess like all frauds, it's the only thing they know.
Oh, that bulge on the President's back? It's a spine, Charlie, look into it.
CBS planning a last minute hit piece on Bush? No way. They are above reproach. Remember that they will not even release the results of the Rathergate investigation until after the election because it may affect the outcome of the election.
They haven't purged all their hate for Bush - the pit must be bottomless.
I thought nobody watched them anymore.
CBS - scum of the nation. Tratiors, actually.
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