Kinda reminds me of when my marriage was breaking up. It was heart-breaking then; it's heart-breaking now.

I loved the part when Cheney made the condescending remark about how hard it was to make Tim understand what he was saying. I'm hoping that when Tim went home and thought about it he realized he had been royally insulted, and he will grow a pair for the next interview. Too late for the last one, but maybe next time...

Bush promised in the 2000 campaign "moderation and compassionate conservatism". Boy, and to think I bought that nonsense.

It was obvious to many of us back then that it was a slogan with nothing behind it. But I guess people believe what they want to believe.

Anyone seeing Bush's mano-a-mano with Matt Lauer recently will know what kind of individual we have fronting the Cheney administration. Not quite the amiable aw shucks image that sycophants like Frank Bruni painted.

I suppose it's possible it was on Sid Caesar too-- though it sounds far too racy for 50s TV-- but it's one of the vignettes in the (sexist but very funny) 60s comedy A Guide for the Married Man. Joey Bishop is the deadpan husband. Sid Caesar, incidentally, turns up elsewhere in the film.

And the lesson from the guide: Deny, deny, deny

Gee, that is a nice oversimplification of, well, everything. You completely ignored that the inspectors were actually doing a good job. To Bush's chagrin, Saddam had folded, was reluctantly allowing us to see that he didn't have the nasty things everybody suspected he had. Therefore Bush rushed to war, forcing the team under Hans Blix to leave.

It's also important to remember that Cheney and Bush doctored the information that was supplied to Congress. As for George Tenet, well, he became a Yes-Man for Bush pretty early on. Calling him Clinton's CIA Director is a pretty dishonest attempt at deflection.

I remember snorting with derision as Bush told the press that "he was sick and tired of the lies", knowing back then the bitter irony. But I get my news from German and British sources, so I saw the global skepticism you probably were kept ignorant of by Fox News. The Iraq we saw was a paper tiger, full of bluster but rotted and rusted inside.

You also get wrong the whole issue of leaving. In fact, the current (at least in name) Iraqi government has more than once asked the US to set up a departure timetable. Right now the US forces are treading water, with too few troops to accomplish the mission, too few new recuits, a severe supply problem due to wear and tear, and no goal other than self-preservation. Either we bite the bullet and draft enough soldiers to finish the job, or we pull out and concentrate our efforts on helping NATO in Afghanistan.

Finally, you pull out the old canard of this being "Bush hatred". It has nothing to do with hating the man, though he is remarkably incompetent. It is his incompetence that is the source of criticism, not the character. Compared to the blind hatred the authoritarians showed to Clinton, Bush junior is actually treated with indifference. Clinton was hated because he won, but Bush is dscorned because he is an incompetent who has fucked up nearly every project he has started. Once he is out of office he will be irrelevant, something you can't say about the continuing vitriolic demonising of Clinton.

Edit-This is in reply to mmpost99. For some reason the reply link is not working.

The case for war did not rest on Iraq's possession of WMDs alone. Iraq with WMDs was not a threat to America, especially an immediate threat.

Indeed, the major arguments revolved around Iraq's supposed support of terrorism in general, and Al Qaeda in particular.

From there it was presupposed by the administration that Iraq would generously hand over these WMDs to the terrorists, who would then bring them over to use against Americans. Because this unknowable unknown could happen at any minute, this part of the administration's case for invasion also fit in nicely with it's desire for an immediate war.

The problem here is that the administration made connections between Iraq, Al Qaeda and WMDs that had no basis in, or support by, the intelligence community. See pre-war assessments in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's just released Iraq Intelligence Phase II Reports.

I fail to see how "Bush hatred" jeopardizes Iraqi self-rule. Surely you meant "Bush behavior"?

"It is unknowable how long that conflict [the war in Iraq] will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."Rumsfeld-Feb.2003

Interesting how this post is related to the post you have over at Greenberg's thread on Bush's radicalism. Everybody had the same intel, right? Just how did the actual use of the aluminum tubes get ignored dispite those rebelling CIA people trying to resist Bush's "policies". Everybody here knows I could come up with a list of intellegence distortions. So if everybody saw the same distorted intellegence (which by the way is why there were distortions - he needed to sell this war) why would any other outcome evolve [sorry to use that word].
dc

It was Harvey Korman, Hoppy.  But who's Carol Burnett? Did you hear the one about the nice thing about Alzhiemer's?  You're always making new friends.

Neoboho

Cheney, like Christopher Hitchens, gets away with absurd arguments because most TV interviewers don't catch the nuances of what he is alleging. We know Zarqawi was in Iraq, he claims, and there was a relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda going back ten years.

Except Zarqawi was in Kurdish-controlled, no-fly-zone Iraq and the only "relationship" was Saddam's people saying, "not interested."

Someone needs to nail his shoes to the floor.

Last year, I spent half a year in the U.S..
I moved, chiefly, among academics of different kinds in Upstate New York. Republicans were nowhere in sight. Independents, yes, but none who admitted to support the Republicans.

What struck me was how small differences I found between the views of people I learned to know and the policies of the White House - at the same time as quite a few appeared seriously upset with almost anything the administration and its supporters did at that time.

As you read thru the book you will be shaking your head. How in the world was Bush allowed to get us into these messes? And then, you realize, it was not for lack of information.

A few observers proposed to me that the American society has been in rapid change culturally, ideologically, since the 1970s whereas the Australian or European have not - or at least not along the same road. But that the Democratic Party somehow has become seen as stuck in those old thoughts associated with the Vietnam disaster and hippies and other things truly foreign to the American soul.

I wonder who has accomplished this, but it seems to me that people like Sid were considered as little credible as were foreigners. It was not so much the problem that the Republicans branded their opposition as un-American. The chief problem was and remains that the American public is so very susceptible for that, and so prone to value anything American so much higher than anything foreign.