Here's a very revealing item, right from Joe Wilson's mouth (or keyboard). On the question of WHEN Joe Wilson & friends began their campaign to undermine the WH, here are a couple of VERY interesting comments Wilson made for an online forum conducted by the Kerry campaign. Wilson makes it sound like he despised GW Bush before the November 2000 election and was "ready to fight" right from the start of the Bush administration! This raises the question of what surreptitious discussions and activities were going on among Wilson, Plame, Larry Johnson, Rand Beers, Richard Clarke, et al in 2000-2002...... and it makes Valerie Plame's effort to have her husband sent to Niger on the uranium mission even more suspicious!!
JOE WILSON: "When the neoconservatives got control of our national security policy, I knew we needed to mobilize to fight"
"Here's a very revealing item, right from Joe Wilson's mouth (or keyboard). On the question of WHEN Joe Wilson & friends began their campaign to undermine the WH, here are a couple of VERY interesting comments Wilson made for an online forum conducted by the Kerry campaign. Wilson makes it sound like he despised GW Bush before the November 2000 election and was "ready to fight" right from the start of the Bush administration!"
Yeah, I've actually posted that chat session on other threads.
His account of how McCain was treated in South Carolina sounded a little far-fetched to me. It just didn't get that much news at the time.
In the same chat session Wilson went on to say he had just had dinner with the Moveon.org people--and what great people they are.
They probably fed him this line.
That's what I would assume, if he was as close to Al Gore as he portrays it in his book. His book also indicates he became opposed to what he regarded as the neocon orientation in Bush's foreign policy shortly after 9/11. He echoed this when speaking alongside Ray McGovern in his June 2003 EPIC lecture, when he said this in response to a question about the geopolitical agenda behind the Iraq war:
On the other ones, the geopolitical situation, I think there are a number of issues at play; there's a number of competing agendas. One is the remaking of the map of the Middle East for Israeli security, and my fear is that when it becomes increasingly apparent that this was all done to make Sharon's life easier and that American soldiers are dying in order to enable Sharon to impose his terms upon the Palestinians that people will wonder why it is American boys and girls are dying for Israel and that will undercut a strategic relationship and a moral obligation that we've had towards Israel for 55 years. I think it's a terribly flawed strategy.
This is essentially the same perspective McGovern expressed a few weeks ago in Britain during the Downing Street Memo flap.