Suddenly, it becomes imminently clear

my demented brain | 10/11/2003 | dirtboy

[dirtboy]

For weeks now, to the point of annoyance, we’ve witnessed Democratic politicians and liberal media talking heads stating that the threat from Saddam wasn’t imminent, as President Bush had claimed. Nancy Pelosi said it, as did Senators Levin and Rockefeller. The AP and Reuters have claimed it. Bob Edwards on NPR stated it as fact in a softball question to Terry McAuliffe during an NPR interview. By the time the Kay Report was made public, the NY Times felt the lie well-positioned enough to incorporate it into their opening front-page salvo against the evidence Kay presented:

“Analysis: preliminary report delivered by David Kay, chief arms inspector in Iraq, forces Bush administration to come face to face with this reality: that nothing found so far backs up administration claims that Saddam Hussein posed imminent threat to world”

However, anyone who gets their news from non-PIPA approved media outlets is well aware that Bush said nothing of the sort. As a refresher, here are Bush’s actual comments from the 2003 State of the Union Address:

"Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late."

So why would the Dems so transparently alter Bush’s clear meaning here? I initially chalked it up to their pathological tendency to play games with the truth, whether they need to or not. However, upon reflecting upon Charles Krauthammer’s brilliant analysis in his column WMDs in a Haystack, the purpose and timing of this lie and the need for the Dems to distort what Bush said becomes clear. From Krauthammer:

“Ekeus theorizes that Hussein decided years ago that it was unwise to store mustard gas and other unstable and corrosive poisons in barrels, and also difficult to conceal them. Therefore, rather than store large stocks of weapons of mass destruction, he would adapt the program to retain an infrastructure (laboratories, equipment, trained scientists, detailed plans) that could "break out" and ramp up production when needed. The model is Japanese "just in time" manufacturing, where you save on inventory by making and delivering stuff in immediate response to orders. Except that Hussein's business was toxins, not Toyotas.” (emphasis mine)

The Kay Report found the framework of an extensive chemical and biological weapons program, but no weapons themselves. Above and beyond the possibility that the finished weapons themselves are either still hidden or were shipped to another country such as Syria, the existence of this kind of program was both a vindication of the decision to invade and of Bush’s postulation that we should not wait until the threat is imminent.

Hence the need to alter the debate and Bush’s very words.

By shifting the debate to a position where the threat from Saddam was stated by Bush as imminent, the Dems basically are attempting to make the just-in-time manufacturing approach from Saddam irrelevant to the case against him, and the Kay Report, instead of being a justification for the war, instead becomes damnation of Bush and more “evidence” that Bush lied to get us into war.

But the timing is rather interesting – the Dems started lying about this well before the Kay Report went public. How could they have been aware of the need to engage in damage control over the Kay Report and lay the groundwork of widespread lying before the report came out?

I believe that the answer lies in Kay’s initial Senate briefing on his findings that happened in late July. Kay made it clear that Saddam had engaged in an extensive deception campaign to hide his WMD programs. I would also speculate that Kay confided to the Senators present that he had found programs but no weapons. It is my belief that at least one Dem Senator, seeing the problems that Kay’s findings would present to their attacks on Bush, saw the need to change Bush’s position regarding the threat from Saddam, hence the sudden barrage of claims from the Dems that Bush stated the threat from Saddam was imminent.

If this is the case, a Dem Senator took a classified briefing and used it for purely political purposes. It would be very interesting to track this lie back in time and see when it went into widespread Dem use.

[Vigilantcitizen]

Good job.

[carton253]

Excellent, but then again, I don't expect anything less from you.

[AZLiberty]

USA today, 1/29/03, the day after the State of the Union, has this paragraph quoting Ted Kennedy:

Congress voted last fall to authorize military action, but Kennedy said he wanted to require Bush to give Congress "convincing evidence of an imminent threat" before sending troops to war.

Here's Kennedy's request for a congressional resolution demanding proof of an "imminent threat" before Bush could act on the resolution already authorizing him to use force.

[arasina]

From The Miami Herald

---

Posted on Wed, Jun. 18, 2003

Graham: Bush deceived the public over threat in Iraq
BY FRANK DAVIES
fdavies@herald.com

WASHINGTON - Sen. Bob Graham Tuesday appealed to centrist Democrats with a low-key call for fiscal responsibility and a hard-edged critique of President Bush that included an incendiary word: impeachment.

Graham, a Florida Democrat running for president, said he recently had seen ''Impeach George Bush'' buttons on the campaign trail.

He was asked in New Hampshire if Congress would impeach the president ''if in fact it was found there was manipulation of intelligence in order to create public support for the war'' in Iraq.

''My answer was no, but the American people will have an opportunity to collapse both steps -- impeachment and removal from office -- on the first Tuesday of November 2004,'' Graham told a couple hundred members of the New Democrat Network meeting in Washington.

Graham, former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, did not see an impeachable offense in the buildup to war, but accused the administration of ''deception and deceit'' in its foreign and domestic policies. ''We were sold on war with Iraq because of an imminent threat to the United States of weapons of mass destruction,'' he said. 'Now we can't find `Osama Bin Forgotten' or Saddam Hussein or those weapons.''

[arasina]

From The Iowa Register (Excerpted)

Candidate Dean's Iraq stance targets rivals

But the Democratic candidates aren't that far apart on the Iraq issue, a professor says.

THOMAS BEAUMONT
Register Staff Writer
03/02/2003

---

Dean has always supported a unilateral U.S. attack on Iraq if the nation posed an imminent threat to the United States or its allies. As early as October, Dean told reporters in Des Moines, "It's conceivable we would have to act unilaterally, but that should not be our first option."

"The reason I would have voted against the resolution is they gave the president authority to attack Iraq without making the case that there's an imminent threat," Dean said last week. "A vote is a vote. I disagree with their vote. I think that's a pretty significant difference."

Iowa Register Article

Looks to me like the Dems decided Dean had come up with a winning turn of phrase.

[CyberAnt]

Actually .. last week Brit Hume took on the "imminent threat" issue. Not that he had much choice .. I had been hounding FOX for several weeks about it .. sending messge after message complaining that this statement was not only distorting what the President said, they were making it a blatant lie .. and I felt FOX was doing nothing to stop it. I told FOX that FreeSpeech is a 2-way street. It's not just allowing the democrats to rant on and on, and distort everything. FreeSpeech was about CHALLENGING what the democrats said .. especially when FOX KNEW it was incorrect.

Finally .. success. Brit took on the challenge and actually explained what the President said .. and of course when Brit did that .. it made it obvious the democrats had totally distorted Bush's words.

A day or so later, there was Daschle on the Senate floor saying, "well .. maybe the President didn't say 'imminent threat' .. but .. blah blah blah blah."

We must never give up trying to make the democrats accountable for their words.

[Stultis]

in their efforts to slime Arnold as a Hitler sympathizer, they didn't even use the ellipses

In fairness, the problem there, as I understand, is that were at least two different transcripts of Arnold's interview. The guy who did the interviews suggested the differences stemmed from difficulty in understanding Arnold's accent (much thicker at the time). The actual tapes were turned over to Arnold long ago (per the interviewer) and no longer exist (per Arnold).

[dirtboy]

Actually .. last week Brit Hume took on the "imminent threat" issue. Not that he had much choice .. I had been hounding FOX for several weeks about it ..

I watched C-SPAN on Sunday, they had Byron York on, and a caller raised the issue as well there. We need to get it out that this is not just a random error but an orchestrated campaign of deceipt by the Dems.

[PigRigger]

"By shifting the debate to a position where the threat from Saddam was stated by Bush as imminent, the Dems basically are attempting to make the just-in-time manufacturing approach from Saddam irrelevant to the case against him....."

Or re-write history IMHO.

Nice job.

[dirtboy]

Add Dick Morris to the Imminence Front:

Bush should display his anger at intelligence failure

"The interim CIA report by investigator David Kay on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq is inconclusive as to whether Saddam Hussein was planning to rebuild his arsenal, but it is quite clear that the imminent, massive buildup for such weaponry, upon which the invasion of Iraq was predicated, had not, in fact, happened. "

[okie01]

Aside from his credibility, I'm wondering more and more about the propriety of Wilson's actions.

This whole affair is, if anything, more about him than about the Bush White House.

Aided and abetted by the mainstream media, of course...

[dirtboy]

Nice wrap-up to this matter. Glad to see we've driven the libs from the field of battle, but there will be a new one tomorrow. Oh, well, such is the life of a conservative activist...

[okie01]

Do you get the weary feeling that this was all about grown men playing little boy's games?

By this, I refer not only to Joseph C. Wilson IV, but to such as Walter Pincus, Nicholas Kristof, sundry Democrat senators, et al.

It seems to provide a conclusive assessment on the bankruptcy of liberalism.

[dirtboy]

Do you get the weary feeling that this was all about grown men playing little boy's games?

To some extent - but to me what is troubling is that what they are doing is so transparent yet they believe that it is an effective strategy to attack Bush. It used to be that the mainstream media limited themselves to Orwell's most powerful form of lie - omission - yet still felt some level of obligation to ensure that the facts that they did report still held up to inspection. Now they seem to believe that they can just spout off one whopper after another, with clearly traceable conspiracies to lie to the public - and when we call them on it, they issue a non-apologetic apology that basically blames us for pointing out their lies.

I guess only time will tell whether or not this shift hurts them, although general trends indicate that they are getting hammered in the shrinking segment of centrist voters who still pay serious attention to what they are saying. My hope is that they will be reduced to preaching to the choir composed of the 40 percent or so of Americans who are liberals - but in turn that leads to a danger of an even more polarized electorate, as the respective perceived reality of the liberals drifts further away from the real-world reality that we live in. So, in the end, Saddam's WMDs are an effective weapon against America after all - by corroding the body politic because the Dems now see them as a political weapon.

[Wolfstar]

Brilliant analysis, Dirtboy. Your post is an example of why I so enjoy FR. Many people who participate on FR actually think through issues. Imagine that...when the elites keep trying to numb our minds and get us into our touchy-feely side.

You concluded with these two sentences:

If this is the case, a Dem Senator took a classified briefing and used it for purely political purposes. To this I say, it wasn't the first and won't be the last time. The modern professional political class sucks, in my not so humble — but rather ticked — opinion.

It would be very interesting to track this lie back in time and see when it went into widespread Dem use. Might take awhile, but I'll give it a shot. Tough to do in-depth research without a Lexis-Nexis subscription. But at least it's not impossible thanks to the Internet.

[dirtboy]

Might take awhile, but I'll give it a shot. Tough to do in-depth research without a Lexis-Nexis subscription. But at least it's not impossible thanks to the Internet.

I think buckhead wrapped it up nicely in post #72.

[Wolfstar]

Super find, Miss Marple. I'm just now reading this thread and catching up with the dialogue. Certainly that LA Times piece has to be one of the earliest to use the "imminent threat" lie. Tracking it back to its source may be difficult since, as you suspect, Dirtboy, some behind-the-scenes Dem may have put out the word to use that line. But what I was going to try to do tonight was search for same-day wire service stories about the state of the union address. It's entirely possible that the first use of the lie can be found in a story by AP, Reuters, or other news service. If someone's got the time to do such a search earlier than I can, so much the better.

[Wolfstar]

...she literally dropped a clause from a sentence in order to change its meaning...

As a former media insider, I unfortunately have to report to you that factual errors occur in the media every day of the week, in all sorts of stories. It can be due to a deliberate misrepresentation, or just to sloppy reporting. But the average consumer of news is oblivious to it unless it occurs in a story about which the consumer has some personal knowledge.

For example, if someone follows a particular sports team avidly, he or she is more likely to catch a factual error that turns up in a story about that team. But the same person wouldn't have any basis for spotting factual errors such as the Maureen Dowd example, unless he or she took the time to doublecheck everything Dowd wrote. It's a sad state of affairs, because the media has the power to ruin lives and reputations, as well as to push a political agenda.