Do these fucksticks really BELIEVE their own bullshit? Seriously? Does he truly and honestly believe Saddam Hussien had even the slightest thing to do with 9/11? If so, then that alone makes his credibility zero, not to mention his adherance to the "No Attacks Mythology".

And Operation Bush Legacy Revision continues....

And there it is again! Keep the ignorant in line by repeating the same crap. Facts are liberally biased, after all.

One more time: Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. There was not an Al Qaeda in Iraq until after we caused a total collapse of the government.

Since I know at least one person will chime in to tell me how much better the world is without Saddam, I'll state up front he was a horrible human. No one knew that better than the Bush administration people who worked with him as part of the Reagan regime (and Bush I until he went too far with Kuwait). Going into Iraq was purely payback for Uncle Saddam's failure to kick Iran's ass as he was paid to do - he became our despot of choice after our previous pawn, the Shah, was deposed.

Then there's rummie's military brilliance: After mandating planning for the invasion of Iraq (while we were still trying to get a solid grip in Afghanistan), he rejected the recommended CoA for Iraq and demanded a plan with limited people to prove his transformation theories. Any talk of the post-invasion occupation was squelched because it was irrelevant remember we were going to be greeted as liberators. And the Powell Doctrine of having an exit strategy? Belittled like everything else related to him. Strange that it became known as cut & run.

One last rant (for now): Of course we thought he still had some of the WMDs we helped him aquire, but guess what the consensus was on whether/when he would use them? Try when backed into a corner and faced with losing everything.

I don't know why Fleischer is even talking, or any of these Bush flunkies. I know they're trying to revise history but they're doing a terrible job of it(no surprise considering how catastrophic their administration was) and no one's buying it anyway. If anything, in time, people may forgive and forget some of Bush's mistakes, but why do they want to remind us on a daily basis of the bullshit they spewed for 8 years?

First off, great post over at Huff as usual. Their lucky to have your weekly insight.
Now as for ARI the Magnificent, what a pompus little freakin ass. Even Matthews who is one of the best, couldn't believe the crap coming out of ARI's orafice.

The one thing that terrifies me most, is the media continues to let these certifiable wingnuts on the air. Irregardless of the damage they cause with their radical doomsayer mentality.

Keep tellin, the truth and hopefully we can win this war for the civilized world. One things for sure, President Obama has these crazy b..ast...rds scrambling for cover. Seeing Grandpa Bernie in cuffs made me tingle down my leg. LOL

Hmm. A careful reading of the quote, assuming the transcript is accurate, reveals that Ari Fleischer was factually correct in his statement, and made no assertions that Saddam had attacked us in the first place. Quoted again, with added emphasis:

"how could we take the chance that Saddam might *NOT* strike again?"

It's what he and his bosses did in the run-up to the war: make statements that, while not false assertions in and of themselves, allow and encourage inference of the "grave and gathering" threat, all the while allowing for deniability when cornered.

Classic Public Relations languaging tactics, from what I know of PR. Which isn't much, admittedly.

Ari, "how could we take the chance that you might *NOT* have sex with your mother again?"

You know what would have been better Ari?

Making the world a better place without Osama bin Laden.

Hey Bruno, I love ya, but that is complete semantics. The point of the sentence is to conflate Saddam Hussein and 9/11 whether or not Fleischer used the word, "not." I know we agree on that.

But after reading it with your emphasis on "NOT", there is no possible way you can say that Ari's statement is factually correct unless he admitted that Saddam didn't attack us and that he was saying, "If so and so attacked once, how can we sit back and let a threat like Saddam take his shot?" which he definitely did NOT do.

BTW, when I heard that that quote yesterday as I was watching Hardball, I was very happy I didn't have anything in my hands at the moment, or else I would have been shopping for a new flatscreen today.

Brutally Honesy,

"but guess what the consensus was on whether/when he would use them? Try when backed into a corner and faced with losing everything."

You're kidding me, right? Tell that to the Kurds, and the Iranians he used them against. Yes, yes, I'm pretty sure the Kurds were the greatest threat Saddam Hussein ever faced.

Hi Carl--warm fuzzies reciprocated, truly.

We're actually in agreement about this fact. It is semantics. The entire PR campaign for the war was a game of semantics like this. I noted this to my small circle of people who would listen to my rantings back in 2002, and was surprised that more people weren't "getting" it. The only difference is that now I can type them out rather than stand, shouting, on a street corner.

Parse it out more completely: "having been hit once" is in passive voice, and relates to the subject, "we". He never said Saddam hit us once. He said, plainly, that we were hit once. That much is true. This stuff is insidious.

Now, this could also be a Freudian slip, confirming that he is well-aware that Saddam had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11/01.

Nanotyrannus,

Yes, the world would be a better place without Osama bin Laden, but the likelihood of us ever finding him is small. Even finding Hussein was a bit of luck. Fact is, if you are dedicated, you can hide in this world indefinitely. Shave his beard, and no one in America could recognize him as he walked right by them. Just ask Nazis who are STILL coming out of the woodwork, sixty- four years after WW2, how hard it is to find someone who doesn't want to be found.

Here's my question for you guys: Say we capture UBL alive. What do you do with him? Me? I kill him on the spot, and if you tell me why you wouldn't, I'll tell you why I would.

PPP, that would be back in the 80s when 1) He still had WMDs and 2) He attacked the Kurds and the Iranians with the full support and blessing of St. Ron.

I always find in amazing that the republicans suddenly had this huge outpouring of sympathy for the plight of the Kurds after the whole quest for the smoking mushroom cloud blew up in their collective face. They didn't give a rat's ass about the Kurds when Saddam was actually slaughtering them while St. Ron and Rummy were selling him the ammo to do it. But 20 years after the fact, suddenly, it became such a great and noble thing that the "liberated" them. Nevermind that prior to the launching of Operation Fix Daddy's Mistake, thanks to our enforcement of the no-fly zone and other sanctions, the Kurds were already living in a semi-antonymous region. Why let facts get in the way of a good ex post facto justification.

Of course, none of that has anything to do with Ari's latest attempt to conflate 9/11 with Operation Fix Daddy's Mistake. Someone should tell him that the Ministry of Truth has been closed and Winston was sent home.

Or better, just STFU.

I think you guys would enjoy Morgan Spurlock's Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden?...this war of terror is a sordid affair. Time to put an end to the madness.

D.C.

My, my, my, you light up easily.

The Kurds were attacked by Hussein in 1991 and 1992. St. Ronnie had nothing to do with it, and no American was cheering him on. Get your facts straight. The Kurds lived in FEAR. Furthermore, it was the Clinton administration in the mid 90's that sounded the bells of alarm about Iraq building weapons of mass destruction. NO ONE DOUBTED IT THEN.

You tell me to STFU, while you flat-out make shit up. Nice.

Blow me.

I'm shocked PPP is cheerleading the war and its conduct again, SHOCKED! Reading and timeline comprehension are as irrelevant as facts. Notice I said WE believed he had them? But try to shift the discussion away from the point and go to the always good fallback position: It's Clinton's fault.

Yeah, I saw the urinary olympics you and GI had about service. If you were involved in planning at a higher level than I was (Unified Command) please enlighten me.

brutly,

Fuck yeah!

>>urinary olympics

HA!

Yes, of course everything that has happen in the last 20 years was Clinton's fault. Which means everything that happens the next 20 will be President Obama's.

Hmmmm PPP, I'll have to consider that one.

Here's the thing though: I don't believe for a moment they were ever really serious about capturing either one of them. They had already gained everything they'd wanted by making them bogey men. Be afraid! Mushroom clouds! BOO! You're right. They weren't looking for SH so much as they were on the lookout for him should they stumble across some good intel. And why would they? If they capture OBL and do serious damage to his little army, what excuse would they have then for tapping our phones, reading our email, suspending our rights and a host of other shenanigans? They need the bogey men running free and planning to become suiciders and cross the oceans that don't protect us anymore cause they hate freedom and don't want people in the middle east to vote. They needed a threat to shake in our faces every time we started asking questions.

AIPAC strongly suspected there were non-existent WMDs so there is nobody to blame.

Has Doof o'the Day noticed that Saddam is DEAD???

PPP, I was referring to Saddam's actual use of chemical weapons against the Kurds back in the 80s, again with total blessing of St. Ron. Yes, he attacked the Kurds again in the early 90s after Daddy Bush encouraged them to rebel with promises of support and then pulled that rug out from under them. At that point, however, no chemical weapons were used because he was under UN scrutiny and was being forced to destroy them.

As for Clinton, he didn't get us involved in that quagmire because he knew invading Iraq would get us stuck there for years.

Those are the facts. I didn't make any of that up. So you can blow me or STFU. Your choice.

Carl,

Check this post out at TPC...Frank Gaffney doing what I was talking about yesterday:

http://thepoliticalcarnival.blogspot.com/2009/03/video-hardball-chris-matthews-v-ari.html

V.

Here's my question for you guys: Say we capture UBL alive. What do you do with him? Me? I kill him on the spot, and if you tell me why you wouldn't, I'll tell you why I would.

Wow, Mr. The Pooper! You're a real man. God that's sexy.

Brain dead lying corporate ditto-headed shills - GO AWAY!!!!

Brutly,

I didn't mention, not even once, that it was Clinton's fault. Do not put words in my mouth.

Here is what I actually said:

"it was the Clinton administration in the mid 90's that sounded the bells of alarm about Iraq building weapons of mass destruction. NO ONE DOUBTED IT THEN."

Tell me, Brutly, do you see the words "blame Clinton" anywhere in there?

Yeah Elvis,

I know you want to do me. That's been obvious for a long time.

PPP, You're trying to tell me that by throwing Clinton into the discussion you weren't inferring that he was to blame? And fleischer wasn't inferring that saddam was to blame for 9/11.

Why wouldn't I kill UBL after he was captured? Because it's not the right thing to do. See if you can wrap your mind around actual morals instead of just talking a good game.

For grins I went to your blog and was truly surprised that you have some intelligent writing there (and some crap - nancy pelosi as queen). I suspect your problem with the Iraq/saddam discussion is you don't grasp the strategic level. You're not alone as keeping the discussion at a tactical win/lose level was part of the overall perception management campaign. Talking about the world being better off without saddam (true) deflected discussion of whether going into Iraq was in our best interest (not). After realizing their BS about being greeted as liberators was, in fact, BS, the bushies kept changing their purported goals for Iraq so it wasn't surprising they couldn't develop a coherent policy.

Brutly,

I deleted the Nancy Pelosi article...when I tried to verify the source, it didn't add up to what I had written.

Anyway, no, I was not inferring that Bill Clinton was to blame. The facts are such that Clinton KNEW Hussein had WMD's, and the capability to make more. It wasn't an opinion, it was fact. In 1996, five years after the Iraqis had claimed that ALL of their WMD capabilities had been destroyed, the UN inspection teams found and destroyed a large WMD production facility. To this day, 600+ kg of Anthrax go unaccounted for; could be destroyed, like the Iraqis claimed, might not be, because there has never been evidence supplied either way.

You will continue to believe it was the wrong thing to do. I will believe otherwise. I think the psyche of the nation at the point we went back contributed to our decision, and I think more people than are admitting supported that decision at that time.

Why would I send UBL to his grave? Because I wouldn't take a chance at giving him a voice; any voice, anywhere, anytime. Giving bin Laden a trial or a voice, in my opinion, would increase the success of Al Qaeda to recruit new members. The longer that takes, the more media coverage there is, the more that radicals will be able to paint him as a living hero defying the Great Satan right in our homeland.

You know our media would not be able to contain the months of multiple orgasms they would enjoy over the live capture of that man. Media attention would be different were he dead. No "victory" can be proclaimed by radicals. There's just the dead body...see?, he was just human after all.

I also would not want to give the man a microphone. Can you imagine the outrage in our nation if he used trial testimony to issue orders to his followers? Questions like , "Why didn't anbody think he might do something like this?" come to mind. Again, a major victory for Al Qaeda while America looks like an idiot.

That's sort of like, one day after 9/11, our newspapers and networks discussing the many different ways that a terrorist could attack us and really, really hurt us, and by the way, here's how they could achieve it, in case they wanted to know. "Just attack our food supply, we basically don't guard it, we'd be totally fucked. But if that doesn't work, try poisoning our water, it's centrally located so you could really kill a lot of us if you wanted to, with a few drops of this, which you can buy at any local drugstore, like Walgreens, for $10.99."

Morals? Is this there where you tell me what morals I am supposed to obey?

Tell me, Brutly, in what way has Usama bin Laden earned the consideration of morals other than his own? Do you really want to bring this man back to America, where there can be no moral victory once this thing hits the media?

Our enemy does not think like you and I, Brutly. He pays no homage to honor, mercy, or morals. In fact, he considers it cowardice. We can control the spin in our nation, but in the nations where he recruited his followers, there is no spin you can generate that they would consider valid.

It does not sound good, I know. In our culture, we would consider it cold-blooded murder. But the man will be killed anyway. You know it, I know it, the entire world knows it. Is it NOT cold blooded murder because we had determined to kill him only AFTER we went through the charade of a "trial"?

I understand your position, and am not prone to killing people who surrender. But UBL is different. I say that knowing how that sounds; nevertheless, it remains the truth.

Tell me, Brutly, in what way has Usama bin Laden earned the consideration of morals other than his own?

Why are we conflating morality and the Rule of Law in this discussion? Putting aside the very basic argument that holding to one's moral code in the face of its exact antithesis is perhaps the only time one's moral code means jack squat, the bottom line is that we're a nation of laws regardless of the lawlessness we're forced to confront.

Macho posturing Gut-Instinct Cowboy Horseshit is what got us into this asshole of a war. If "UBL" -- which, I'm sorry, sounds like some fuckhole line of urban ass-crack clothing and popularizes a murderer in a way that I suppose makes it easier for you to murder in the public square -- were quietly donkeypunched with a bunker-buster by a Crack Squad of America's Finest, I wouldn't lose any sleep. But if a self-righteous ex-soldier that should know better took it upon himself to violate U.S. and international law in the execution of a surrendered combatant, I'd do everything I could to stop you.

But more to the point, Mr. The Pooper, your "morals" are for shit if they can't withstand the crucible of your enemy's amorality. That's the whole point of having morals in the first place, Rambo.

PPP,
I',m slow getting back to this so it may not get read. Your response, however, deserves the courtesy of a reply.

I didn't realize you had taken the pelosi piece down - good for you, seriously, for doing so.

I'll apologize for jumping to the conclusion you were inferring Clinton was to blame. I believe you can understand why I did though.

I think the psyche of the nation at the point we went back contributed to our decision, and I think more people than are admitting supported that decision at that time.

The psyche of the Nation was deliberately used against the citizens of this country by falsely linking Iraq and 9/11 - that's where we started this discussion.

Elvis covered the morality aspect better than I could, but I will add that it isn't about his morals - it's about ours and what makes the USA better than them. During part of my career I was a bomber pilot and I'd gladly suit up again to drop ordnance on that fucker. But if he surrendered (which he's to vain to ever do) the rules change.

You will continue to believe it was the wrong thing to do. I will believe otherwise.

Concur.

Elvis,

I would expect you to do everything you could to stop me. It's what makes my country so great. Furthermore, I would not only understand why you were doing so; but I would agree with your reasons.

Me self righteous? Maybe in my dreams, but not in reality. Look, Elvis, I know that what I would do is wrong. That's the difference between me and UBL. I don't say I would kill him for revenge, pleasure, or to feel better because I killed a man who couldn't defend himself. It's not about that, and I think you know it.

The rules for Usama Bin Laden changed when he no longer avowed himself of anyone's rules but his own. In the end, if we are not allowed to protect ourselves based on our one-size-fits-all moral code, we are lost. I am surprised by the Left's lack of understanding that there is more than just black and white to right and wrong. Or maybe you understand it, but only apply it when it suits you?

Take the Iraq war for example. You believe it was wrong, you believe we invaded a sovereign nation wrongly. You would also agree that it is wrong for any leader to oppress his people. But your belief dictates that instead of helping the many and freeing them from oppression, you instead choose to honor a "nation's" right to sovereignty, no matter how many people suffer or die from that sovereignty.

Your moral code is a bit fucked up. Elvis. You cannot reconcile what you believe is right with what you actually DO about it. And here you stand on some high ground, as though your answer is the only answer that makes sense. You'd condemn an entire nation to oppression, you would sacrifice them all in order to keep your moral mirror spotless.

Tell me, Elvis, will it be moral to kill this man after a trial? That's the law. He'll hang, and you know he will. But your sense of justice dictates that you hold a show first, and then kill him. We can't possibly be righteous until we've held this man for a year, and paraded him around for the press to take their pictures, ...............and then we kill him. That makes it ALL better.