"Bush's self-delusion, disengagement, and sheer mush-headedness..."

link
http://www.slate.com/id/2130884

The Misleaders
Who is Dick Cheney kidding?
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005, at 7:05 PM ET


Dick Cheney calls it "dishonest," "reprehensible" and "not legitimate" to claim that the administration misled the public about prewar intelligence. In his speech at the American Enterprise Institute on Nov. 21, the vice president added for good measure that "any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false."

Most Democrats in Congress think that prewar intelligence was indeed distorted and hyped—though not "fabricated," which, like the accusation that they have accused Bush of "lying," is a straw man of Cheney's. Democrats believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, and others misrepresented what our government knew about Saddam Hussein's WMD capacity and his links to terrorists in order to make a stronger case for invading Iraq.

So, who's right? Did Bush officials mislead us, or didn't they?

Because the Republicans who control Congress have prevented any investigation into the administration's use of prewar intelligence (as opposed to the gathering and formulation of that intelligence), there's a lot we still don't know. Officials haven't yet had to answer questions about what they knew or did not know when they advanced various spurious claims. And even the kind of investigation that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is demanding could prove frustratingly inconclusive, because proof of deception requires knowing someone else's state of mind. In the president's case, it may be possible to show that he should have known enough to avoid some inaccurate assertions, including the notorious "16 words" in his 2003 State of the Union address about Saddam seeking to buy significant quantities of uranium from Africa. But as with Ronald Reagan during the Iran-Contra scandal, Bush's combination of self-delusion, disengagement, and sheer mush-headedness nearly precludes the possibility of willful deception.

Here's what we do know already, without a congressional inquiry: Members of the Bush Administration were dishonest with the public and with Congress about prewar intelligence. We've known this for some time—see, for example, the comprehensive and damning story Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus wrote in the Washington Post in August 2003 ("Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence"). Over the past two years, several incidents of executive-branch dishonesty in the run-up to the war have turned into subscandals of their own: the aluminum tubes that Iraq used for missiles and not gas centrifuges, the yellowcake uranium that Saddam didn't try to buy from Niger, the mobile biological warfare laboratories that turned out to be hydrogen generators for balloons, the al-Qaida chemical warfare training that was based on a false confession, the meeting with Mohamed Atta that didn't happen in Prague.

turned out to be the smoking gun. Now STFU.

angry about the fact that they'd been lied to or misled on something as major as Iraq.

...If we can get enough of them out of office in 06, maybe they will be.

were we simply too lazy to search out/demand proof, or the truth, before Iraq became a tragedy? Look, are you going to try and tell me, that there weren't questions being asked on the local front, by regular people, in/on any bar/restaurant/home across America/web site on the internet?? Questions that our representatives in Congress/Senate should have been demanding answers to on their level?? I belong to groups that were asking, what on earth is he thinking, what are we doing, regular people who could see numerous reasons not to go to war and in their own minds, knew the information we were being fed had to be blatantly incorrect, or at the very least questionable....didn't we know that we had been bombing/sanctioning Iraq for the past 12 years, for heaven's sake????didn't our Congressmen/Senators know that????didn't we remember all the munitions/chem/bio weapons stores that OUR troops destroyed during Gulf War 1?...if I recall correctly, anti-war sentiment was expressed all over the world, and in the UN...Bush had to actually threaten the small countries that joined the "coalition of the willing" to get them to join...yet...our Congress/Senate members still voted for the IWR?....what the hell did they think *'s intent was???? It stands to reason, IF he never intended to go to war in Iraq, he wouldn't have needed the IWR vote in the first place....misled, you say???

IMO...any member of Congress that voted for the Patriot Act...and I will add, w/o reading it first...or who voted for the IWR..no matter which party they represent...has questions to answer from their constituents(if only their constituents would grab that bull by the horns)...why did you vote FOR either, explain yourself and your motivation (or be replaced)...and when do those elected admit that they didn't do the job they were entrusted with, nor did they work in the best interests of the American people who put them into office. Or am I totally incorrect and the R's passed these alone?? with NO help from Democrats?

See our problem is, we need to DEMAND accountability from everyone involved in dragging this country into an unnecessary conflict.... Maybe if the ones who have currently been ELECTED can be misled so easily, it would do us good to be more selective in the future...
windbreeze

you hit my thoughts on the head. i discussed this with many people, i was not fooled from the start. that display Colin Powell put on at the UN was pathetic.