The handling of this yellowcake controversy was a White House botch job from the beginning. The president was and still is correct when he cited British intel. that indicates Saddam's agents were in Niger seeking to obtain yellowcake uranium. Suddenly a partisan hack like Joe Wilson comes along (he worked for the Kerry campaign, likely secretly before doing so openly) and contradicts the president on this and the media goes into full feeding frenzy mode based on little more than his word.
Not one media outlet bothered to look into the merits of the Wilson investigation, including those in Niger who say Wilson never talked to them as he claimed and quite a few people remember him doing little more than lounging around a hotel rather than conducting an actual investigation. Certainly no questions were ever asked about who commissioned this investigation and why. They still aren't asking.
But all that was enough for the shamelessly partisan US news media to pronounce Bush a liar. Unfortunately some in the administration, most notably Condi Rice, Colin Powell and George Tenant allowed their damage control to get out ahead of the facts and backed-off the yellowcake claim, even at one point confusing the British intelligence the president's remarks drew on with an earlier discredited memo from Italian intelligence on the same topic. This was astonishingly sloppy and knee-jerk by a Bush administration renowned for its message discipline.
The administration got hood-winked into backing off the yellowcake story all too soon during a heated-up election season and as a result has been totally run-over by a never-ending parade of lies by Democrats and their media parrots. Indeed, the administration failed terribly in June of 04 to get the message out that it was right afterall when the Senate Intelligence Committee uninamously concluded that in fact the yellowcake story was true and credible, backed up by similar findings by British intelligence and the European Intelligence Agency. Their damage control had simply gotten out too far ahead of the facts on this and they would have looked silly, or at least so they thought, backing off their earlier back peddling on yellowcake.
And the administration continues to get run over by this story now in the form of this Rove dust-up and continues to show the same timidity in not calling Wilson and his wife for the phonies, traitors and felons that they are, and in not showing the vicious lies used to try to damage the president with in Wilson's phony "investigation" in 2003, all done by a guy who later worked for John Kerry's campaign. And as Karl Rove gets run over nightly in the news, Bush continues to maintain his silence about this episode and continues to get flogged by lies being told by Democrats who probably can't believe their good fortune and not having a word of it answered by an adminstration they would stop at nothing to destroy, including by damaging US natl. security to claim Saddam was not seeking yellowcake uranium.
What a terribly incompetent moment of political impotence by the Bush administration communications and political team. The Clinton people would never have allowed their enemies to get away with something like this. Hell, they destroyed people telling the truth about them! Our man Bush and his people just sit there and suck their thumbs out of fear of of speaking up in advocacy of the truth in fear that the media will flog them with it, as if they're not flogging them already.
This whole yellowcake thing will go down as Bush's poorest moment in terms of communicating truth to the public and in failing to expose evil liars like Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame for the partisan traitors they are. Very sad.
I honestly do not know why Bush has kept Scott McClellan; the poor boy stumbles, mumbles, and just seems to make things worse. All I can figure is that Bush owes something to McClellan's mama, Carol Keeton Rylander Strayhorn (I don't know where the McClellan comes in her lengthy last name). Ms. Strayhorn is Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts and will probably run against Perry in the next governor's race (she may win, too).
Regardless of how she manages to balance the Texas budget, she sure raised one slow-witted son.
Enjoyed your comment in post 4.
Yep, that was a good one -- *Bump*
What drives me bananas is that there are so many strings the administration could pull that would unravel the whole thing. It's like, take your pick. If I were the administration, I would use my spokesmen to remind the public over and over again that Wilson is a Dem operative who worked on the Kerry campaign, and that he flat-out lied when he said his wife had nothing to do with his Niger trip.
Of course, it's easy to armchair quarterback these things. Maybe the administration figures this will blow over, or that it'll all fizzle when the results of the investigation come out (forgive my ignorance here, but does anyone know when this is estimated to be?)
Enjoyed your post, though it may be that the administration is waiting for the SP to conclude its investigation first. I wouldn't be surprised if there are some real surprises to come out of this. I really don't see any point in defending at this time as it will only be twisted and used by the media who we know as a matter of fact are Democrat hacks who will not report and investigate but will only use and propagandize for their ends. I am hoping the SP will reveal who the real criminals are in this case.