Friday, February 06, 2004

From the pages of: Anonymoses
Rate Russert
MSNBC - Sunday, February 8th - Sir Tim Russert interviews George W. Bush


Here is the challenge:
-Make a copy of the show.
-Jot down every question Tim asks.
-Rate each question.

George's answers are, as usual, irrelevant and untrustworthy.
Will Tim's questions be equally irrelevant and untrustworthy?

David Corn Gives Tim Russert "8 Questions for George W. Bush"

Anonymoses has broken some of the questions out for us:

Some of the questions:


-Did he decide to use military force against Iraq before 9/11?
-Where are the WMDs he insisted were there?
-Why is he using phony budget numbers?
-Did he engage in less-than-proper business dealings before he entered politics?
-Why he has misled the public while promoting his policies on stem cells research, global warming, and missile defense?
-Why has he opposed certain homeland security measures and not adequately funded others?
-...if the CIA did not say there was a "massive stockpile" of biological weapons in Iraq, what was your basis for asserting a stockpile existed?
-Did you know something the CIA did not? Did you overstate the intelligence?
-Was it not misleading to tell the public that "we don't know" whether Iraq had a nuclear weapon, when, in fact, we did know?
-Can you tell us what evidence you had for saying that Hussein was an "ally" of al Qaeda?
-Can you now give us names of men or women with whom you served in Alabama?
-Why did you not take a flight physical?
-Why did your campaign put out an explanation that was wrong?



Pssst-some of that Paul O'Neill tattle-fodder might have been classified--make like you never heard any of it, America! *pleeeease?*
Well-done, John!
John Edwards found creative use for Bush supporters who
showed up at his "party"!

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards used a couple of Bush-Cheney sign-waving college students to his advantage Friday.

"Guys, hold those signs up in the back if you don't mind,'' Edwards said after snaking his way through the packed ballroom at Virginia Tech University.
The crowd booed as the students obliged, but then broke out in cheers when Edwards claimed:
"That's who's leaving the White House come November!''

Reuters: Sen. John McCain on the Intelligence Commission:
Sen. John McCain is bringing a willingly-admitted prejudice to the table...
when facts are surely pre-decided, how is this supposed to instill public trust in a fair investigation?

Being given the benefit of innocence before being proven guilty is fine for a defendant charged with a crime in a court of law, but a public investigation of an elected official and his administration requires a mind perfectly open to any possibility. To be perfectly honest, based on his statement, I already doubt that I'll trust John McCain to give this a fair hearing.
This whole deal smells pretty rotten to me. No one in their right mind can tell me that a commission can be independent if its nine members are hand-picked by Bush and his team. The White House has ignored their appeals that Congress authorize the commission. This is going to be destructive to the public's trust. If the Democrats don't raise a holy fit over this, they have my undying disrespect. DLC/third-way centrist stalwart-Charles Robb (son-in-law of Lyndon B. Johnson; the same Robb who was considered possible presidential material before a wicked sex scandal damaged him) has been hand-picked to lead the Democratic side of the
"independent" (sooo not) commission.



Washington Post
Tenet: Analysts Never Claimed Imminent Threat Before War

Why did Bush and the Neocons on whom he relied upon claim or even allude to imminent threat before war?

"The 45-minute window under which Iraq is prepared to use biological and chemical weapons is one further sign of worries we have about Iraq and their militaristic intentions."
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer
09/24/2002

"The president of the United States and the secretary of defense would not assert as plainly and bluntly as they have that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction if it was not true, and if they did not have a solid basis for saying it."
Ari Fleischer, Press Secretary
Response to Question From Press
12/04/2002

"...we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons..."
Dick Cheney, Vice President
Meet The Press
03/16/2003

"Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical particularly . . . all this will be made clear in the course of the operation, for whatever duration it takes."
Ari Fleischer, Press Secretary
Press Briefing
3/21/2003

"We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."
Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense
ABC Interview
3/30/2003

"Obviously the administration intends to publicize all the weapons of mass destruction U.S. forces find -- and there will be plenty.."
Robert Kagan, Neocon scholar
Washington Post op-ed
4/9/2003

NY Times/Paul Krugman
Get Me Rewrite!

In his column today, Paul Krugman rightly exposes disinformation from NeoCon princess Laurie Mylroie. I recall reading and commenting about such disinformation from Mylroie last July..along with the incredible disinformation supplied by Judith Miller and used by the New York Times.
Mr. Krugman says:
A tip from Joshua Marshall, of www.talkingpointsmemo.com, led me to a stark reminder of how different the story line used to be. Last year Laurie Mylroie published a book titled "Bush vs. the Beltway: How the C.I.A. and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror." Ms. Mylroie's book came with an encomium from Richard Perle; she's known to be close to Paul Wolfowitz and to Dick Cheney's chief of staff. According to the jacket copy, "Mylroie describes how the C.I.A. and the State Department have systematically discredited critical intelligence about Saddam's regime, including indisputable evidence of its possession of weapons of mass destruction."
In his column, Krugman warns that people such as James Woolsey (who wrote one of the blurbs for Ms. Mylroie's book) has ben mentioned as a possible member of the commission to investigate and examine "intelligence". His fear, like mine, is that the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans will get off the investigation-hook...and that is precisely where the shady cherry-picking of intelligence to promote this war would have taken place.