A few minutes ago I post the following reply to Shield on his new old thread on Wilson:
"What is interesting about this and another thread is that we and other conservatives keep chipping away at the bs/secrecy surrounding Wilson/Plame/McTraitor and other hater Americans who set up a coup attempt against our president."
"Eventually this will ooze to the surface, Wilson, Plame, McTraitor and others will be exposed as liars, spinners and coup planners. Due to the power of the MSM they will just get hand slaps personally. However, it drive more nails into the coffin being built for the DNC and current rats in charge."
“There was a lot of reason to be concerned about weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein,” he told WABC Radio’s Mark Simone. “I always thought that he probably had chemical and biological weapons and biological precursors as well.”
Wilson said his primary policy difference with President Bush wasn’t over Saddam’s WMDs, but rather on the question of “how to construct a policy that gets to the national security issue of disarming Saddam Hussein and does so at minimum risk to other legitimate U.S. interests both in Iraq and in the region.”
But aside from that, Wilson said he cheered President Bush’s decision to topple the Iraqi dictator, telling Simone: “When the president went up to the U.N. and got the [war] resolution unanimously passed at the U.N., nobody applauded louder than I did.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dug this up .. and am rather stunned that PotatoHead totally misstated the President's SOTU statement about WMD .. didn't remember this from June 1, 2003 -- almost to the end of the page:
"Actually, after watching yesterday’s Meet the Press, we can think of several. Does the fog come in on little cat’s feet? So did Russert’s panel of pundits as they discussed those WMDs. David Broder did start the session by saying that the CIA “in my view has been misused by this administration.”
But Russert’s pussy-footin’ panel struggled to keep themselves out of the catnip. Mark Bowden wants the truth. Others aren’t eager to help him.
For example, what about those forged documents about uranium from Niger—the documents Colin Powell touted at the UN? According to Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times (5/6), the documents in question “had been forged so amateurishly that they should never have been taken seriously.” According to Kristof’s reporting, the matter had been clear since February 2002.
{{{LOOKS LIKE ANOTHER LIE}}}At that time, a former ambassador—Cheney’s office had asked him to investigate—“reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.” Kristof: “The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade.” Seymour Hersh did similar reporting on this incident in the New Yorker.
Mark Bowden probably wants to know the truth about this matter. We hope he didn’t watch Meet the Press. Incredibly, this was the panel’s entire discussion of that seminal topic:
RUSSERT: On January 24th, the president’s State of the Union message, he said that “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently bought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” and that now has been proven not to be accurate, that the documents were forged. How does that find its way into a presidential speech?
WILLIAM SAFIRE: That was stupid, and somebody goofed. But that doesn’t derogate the whole thing.
“Somebody goofed,” Safire explained. And that was the total discussion! Russert simply changed the subject, moving on to the next question.
At times, the group seemed to be on Planet La-La. “Nobody ever thought [Saddam] had nuclear arms,” Robert Novak said at one point. And no one contradicted the statement—although Cheney and Rice had both warned the public about those Iraqi nukes.
Earlier, Novak served another howler, saying that the Admin never discussed Iraqi WMDs until “Secretary Powell talked the president into going to the U.N.” No one on the panel demurred, although the statement is complete, screaming nonsense. (Bush warned about Iraqi WMDs at a 10/11/01 press conference. Rice followed suit four days later.) Meanwhile, what do you suppose Broder said when Safire posed this tangy question?
BRODER: I believed the rationale that our government put out. I believed when they said that there are these weapons of mass destruction and we have proof that they exist…What gave this urgency, what gave it the plausibility to go ahead and act on our own against Saddam Hussein was the assertion that he had amassed these weapons of mass destruction.
SAFIRE: But it was a truthful assertion. Nobody—you’re not suggesting that he lied about it?
How did Broder answer? He didn’t—Russert cut the question off, moving to the Potemkin “discussion” about that Niger document.
No, the panel had little time for the questions which trouble Mark Bowden. But they did have oodles of time for one question. They had plenty of time to clown around, asking if Bill Clinton wants to seek a third term. This Sunday, out in America, Mark Bowden had serious questions. But at Meet the Press, they knew their roles. They clowned around about Bill Clinton—and ran from important discussion."