Comment by John Kerry

So he’s more loyal to money than America?

“Did Clinton lie about Iraq’s WMDs, etc.?”

Are you referencing Clinton based on what he was saying in 1998, five years prior to the Iraq invasion?

My first reaction is to offer a counter question: why would he need to lie? As president, he apparently didn’t see the need to invade Iraq to take care of the “problem.” He also didn’t have a VP with ties to a major government contractor in line to receive billions of dollars in no-bid contracts that a multi-year war would bring to the company.

Anyway, it appears that Powell and Rice, as linked to above, likely had updated intelligence with which they declared Saddam a non-threat.

But wait…there’s more! Let’s look at the NIE on Iraq as presented in 2002. As The Hill reports, most Senators didn’t bother to read much, if any, of the NIE when asked. Former Senator and current presidential contender Fred Thompson wouldn’t even respond to requests about whether or not he read the report.
Source.

Isn’t that just grand. Most of them didn’t even read the full report yet they voted to submit this country to an endless war in who the hell knows how many countries.

So, roughly a year-and-a-half after Powell and Rice’s comments, the “intelligence” tells us that Saddam is after all a threat, and must be dealt with post-haste. Looking at the total picture, Clinton in the late 90’s says he is a threat, a few years later Powell and Rice say no, and a year or so after that, Saddam is once again a threat. Add in the fact that the WMD inspectors were asked by Bush to leave Iraq before their jobs were finished; the fact that former CIA agent Tyler Drumheller told Tenet to remove info from Powell’s speech to the UNSC relating to mobile weapons labs because “Curveball,” who provided the info, was not trustworthy (yet it remained in the speech); let’s also add the question regarding how much of the intelligence from Curveball was included in the 2002 NIE.

What it all boils down to is this: the evidence, or lack of, found in Iraq since the invasion pretty much proves what Powell and Rice were saying in early 2001.

Comment by The Man-slag — January 3, 2008 @ 8:37 pm

And you wonder why we think you’re dishonest.

Let’s not forget that Hans Blix, the head of the UNSCOM in Iraq, called the intelligence provided to him by the Bush administration “garbage”; the same intelligence that was supposed to prove the presence of WMD in Iraq.

But Pres Bush ignored what the inspectors were saying and decided to invade anyway.

Comment by Manslagt — January 3, 2008 @ 8:37 pm

No, it wasn’t.

Summary:

There you have it. Four to seven months before 9/11–and just 15 to 18 months before the drive to attack Iraq seriously revved up–the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor trumpeted that Iraq had a decimated military, no “significant capabilities” regarding WMD, and was so feeble that it couldn’t even threaten the countries around it with conventional military power.

Source.

Comment by Manslagt — January 3, 2008 @ 8:37 pm

It took more than a year for the truth to start peeking through. And Clinton didn’t invade Iraq based on that intelligence. So, what’s your point?

Several weeks ago I forced myself to listen to several minutes of his radio show. Went something like this:

Rush said that a listener e-mailed him and said he should push for Hillary to be elected so that everyone could see how she would really run the country, and then Rush could say, “See, I told you so.”

Rush said he wasn’t going to do that, because in 1992 another Clinton was elected and was in for two terms, and “we all know how that turned out.” He didn’t elaborate.

Comment by Manslagt — January 3, 2008 @ 7:05 pm

And he pissed it away when he invaded Iraq on false pretenses.

Comment by Manslagt — January 3, 2008 @ 7:21 pm

More evidence that “conservatives” refuse to take any accountability. It’s all the fault of the press, it’s the fault of the liberals, it’s the fault of the Democrats, it’s Clinton’s fault!!! . . . it’s never the decisions made by the people running the show. No matter how you try to drag Clinton into this, the fact remains that the Bush administration has had seven years to demonstrate their incompetence and they’ve done a bang-up job. Stop blaming everyone else for it and man up.

Comment by Manslagt — January 3, 2008 @ 7:12 pm

Right. Nothing that Bush did had any effect on how people viewed him. That’s typical of “conservatives” who never take any accountability at all. It’s always someone else’s fault when they screw up.

Massive incompetence on the part of the administration might just have played a teeny role in Bush’s failure.

Comment by Manslagt — January 3, 2008 @ 7:05 pm

A stuffed donkey would have had 90% approval at the point, as long as he was President of the country that had just been attacked. That’s a hell of a lot of good will to burn up in a remarkably short time.

Comment by missmolly

I always assumed his hearing impairment was self-inflicted. Isn’t hearing loss one of the common results of mega-doses of vocodin and oxycontin?

Comment by Southern Man — January 3, 2008 @ 5:56 pm

We don’t make fun of his hearing impairment because Rush has never made any rants against the hard of hearing or the deaf.

His record of railing against drug addicts is well-known. His utter hypocrisy makes his drug problem fair game.

All or nothing. Real uniting.

Comment by RUCerious — January 3, 2008 @ 5:30 pm

Bush: “You’re with me or your a terrorist”!