Does He Seem Defensive At All?
Wingnut-welfare wunderkind Stephen Spruiell, of the NRO’s Media Blog, falls into a time warp and emerges back in those heady post-college days of late 2002:
Cherry-Picking Defined
01/15 03:53 PMThe Washington Post has decided that, as a matter of fact, the Bush administration “cherry-picked” intelligence to justify a war with Saddam:
I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s case will put on display the secret strategizing of an administration that cherry-picked information to justify war in Iraq and reporters who traded freely in gossip and protected their own interests as they worked on one of the big Washington stories of 2003.
Cherry-picking: Given a preponderance of intelligence suggesting that a hostile and unstable dictator has weapons of mass destruction and a few scattered reports suggesting otherwise, deciding not to give the madman the benefit of the doubt.
Actually, we can kind of let Valerie Plame answer that. She was, after all, the head of the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group until that unfortunate incident happened, about which many remain quite curious.
PS: Hey Dorothy, d’ja see this yet?
I think the Post is being overly kind. Cherry-picking sounds a lot nicer than ‘lying the country into a disastrous and unnecessary war’.
Sigh. Actually, the preponderance of the evidence suggested that there was no Iraqi WMD program (like the hundreds of UN inspectors who canvassed thousands of sites – pinpointed by US intelligence – and found nothing), with a small amount of evidence that there was a WMD program (almost all of which came through the Chalabi network, when it wasn’t laughably thin (those trailers! drones! aluminum tubes!). The Bushies ignored the reams of negative evidence, focused on the slivers of positive evidence (building an entire intelligence apparatus to “stovepipe” those gossamer claims to the very top where they wouldn’t be vetted by people who could properly place them in context, and politically retaliating against anyone who pointed out otherwise – Plame, etc.), and presented only that evidence to the Congress and the American people. That’s the very definition of cherry-picking.
This is almost as good as Bush’s claim that Saddam’s explusion of UN inspectors in 2003 provided a proper causus bellus and an immediate security threat to the US.
…deciding not to give the madman the benefit of the doubt.
What about giving those 60,000* dead Iraqis and 3000 dead GIs, international law, peace, fairness, justice, and $400 billion the benefit of the doubt? Jeez. This guy makes it sound like your playing baseball in the backyard and tie goes to the invader. Oh oop, we got it wrong. Oh well, it was a close one and at least we tried.
*est., but probably much, much higher.
Spruiell? Really? I know not this Spruiell, but I’m having fun saying his name out loud in a variety of pronunciations and accents. Anyway, to answer your question, Gavin: No, he’s not defensive at all, as long as we’re working with the same dictionary:
preponderance (n). A little bit, a smidgen; one or two or, maybe, in a pinch, three.
intelligence (n). Wishful thinking; bullshit; typically made of whole cloth.
suggesting (pres part). Hinting, rumoring; having no basis in fact but sounding pretty good under the circumstances.
P.S. Congrats, Dorothy, on being the last word on the internets in response to Kevin.
“…a preponderance of intelligence suggesting that a hostile and unstable dictator has weapons of mass destruction and a few scattered reports suggesting otherwise,…”
=============================
In your Wet fucking dreams you LYING sack of shit.
Data-mined and Cheney directed analysis is a more accurate description.
Gavin,
In case the blog wars start again, I have some ammo for you:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=-feLDOpJfYg
http://youtube.com/watch?v=E3yO4mu5pb4
Hold on to your britches…
about which many remain quite curious.
Sadly, none of them work in media. Or government.
(crap–commented on the wrong post! Shoelimpy has warped my brain!)
The Bush administration cherry picked the intelligence in the same way that a serial rapist cherry picks pre-pubescent virgins.
When I watched Colin Powell’s speech in front of the UN, I didn’t need access to “super secret intelligence files!� to assess that argument as a C-minus at best. I couldn’t sign on to blowing a hundred thousand civilians to hell based on a C-minus argument. Still can’t.
(On the progressive gold link–hey, that’s cool!)
*Sigh*
I dunno. Is it just me? I’m tired. Tired of going over the same ground, again and again. Tired of mindless syncophantic creatures slinging the same crap over the same transom day in and day out. Maybe they’ve outlasted me. There’s just no way to make them live in reality, respond to real events and require real knowledge.
How long are we going to have to keep responding to the same mindless drivel? At what point will we no longer have to respond seriously to the same idiocy we were subjected to almost four years ago? Why is it that political blogs, an exciting and democratizing advance in public discoourse, have turned into some kind of low IQ Groundhog Day?
I’m tired of it. The facts are in. I no longer want to banter with cretins and mongoloids over the criminality, cruelty and blatent illegality of Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo. A long time ago I learned the futility of getting up every morning and grinding my face against the same brick wall. And while we piss on each other, arguing about how many WMDs can dance on the head of a pin, people are dying, real people, not Aces and Drudges and O’Reillys and mikeys.
Honestly. Please. Is there a way to move this discussion forward? Must it remain stuck in 2003? Can we stipulate to something, ignore a few idiots, try to get most of the people, for a few precious minutes, talking about something important? I’m old, tired, sick, and working on drunk. But I’m just not sure what all this leads to, y’know? Talk about fiddling while Rome burns, Mister Nero. It’s like we’re complicit in a way. By engaging in nonsense rhetoric while they end civilization on our watch, we seem to be letting the Rodeo Clowns of the Apocalypse get everybody’s attention on the shiny pony of 2003. And no, I have no idea what to do about it. But I’m ready to desert, or surrender, or something equally humilliating, because I just don’t seem to be making a contribution here…
mikey
Is it just me? I’m tired. Tired of going over the same ground, again and again.
Nope. I’m right here with you, mikey.
It’s like we’re complicit in a way. By engaging in nonsense rhetoric while they end civilization on our watch, we seem to be letting the Rodeo Clowns of the Apocalypse get everybody’s attention on the shiny pony of 2003.
Agreed. When we engage in their bullshit “arguments,” we are indeed complicit.
Honestly. Please. Is there a way to move this discussion forward?
Glad you asked. I think the answer is yes. What we have to do is frame the debate. That’s not so hard when “we” means us (y’know, us). It’s tougher when “we” means the media, the Congress, the people with some power to make decisions or at least to be heard.
I was reading Glenn Greenwald’s blog the other day regarding Bush’s expansion of executive powers, and a commenter said something like “The lesson I get from all of this is that resistance is futile.” The statement stood, unchallenged, for another 20 comments or so, until Glenn popped by to say simply, “I disagree.”
I’m with Glenn. Resistance is never futile. The challenge is to be observant, energetic, and smart. Communicate with those who stand a chance of being heard. Example: contact state legislatures (like New Mexico’s) that are leaning toward introducing impeachment of the president to support their efforts. Bombard the blogs of big-name idiots like Time magazine’s Joe Klein and call them on their bullshit (in “civil” language that they can’t easily justify banning). Thers did a great job of this, BTW.
Seriously. A shrinking minority of people in this country are still willing to support the madness. Now is the time to give the majority a reason to move past their hesitance to speak up — show them it’s OK to stand up against the disease afflicting the executive branch.
You sold me, Mort.
Even if the bastards win, resistance isn’t futile. Gandhi and King both essentially said that; your integrity, if not your soul, is on the line.
So we do what we can do. I work to repair the damage that several decades of poorly prioritized development emphasis has done to my city by helping to redevelop under utilized and ignored urban districts.
Sadly Noisians give these people the attention they deserve (notwithstanding Ace’s whining): incessant mockery.
Now, we have to direct some 3Bulls atttention to dickweeds like TuckAmuck Carlson, removing them from positions of prominence in media discussions. Like fungi, they’ve grown in place for quite some time, and it will take the repeated application of the bright light of reality and the sanitizing effect of truth to remove them. It’s not a one step process.
We’re all allowed to get tired, though. take a break. I’ve heard that shutting off the news input for a week or so is particularly effective.
btw, mikey, I like the stuff you’ve posted at home lately. The name of your blog doesn’t apply very well.
“By engaging in nonsense rhetoric while they end civilization on our watch, we seem to be letting the Rodeo Clowns of the Apocalypse get everybody’s attention on the shiny pony of 2003.”
I’m not sure mikey. I think the chair looks better on the fore-deck.
I think that there will be a 15% of the US population that will be constantly obsessed with early 2003. We were right. they’ll screech. Saddam was going to nuke Oklahoma with a Gay Marriage Bomb. or something to that effect. But while it is easy to despair about this constant insanity (and their constant ability to make that insanity part of the national discourse) it is important to remember one important thing: These guys have been rejected in the eyes of the American people.
The pundits may not want to admit this but the verdict was clear in November: Bush doesn’t have a clue and get us out of Iraq please.
I found this just today here
This should scare the fucking bejesus out of any republican kool-aid drinker.
God, I loves me some SadNo-ites.
But OK, in retrospect I wasn’t done, long comment notwithstanding.
I’m really hooked into this idea of complicity by engagement that mikey brings up. I think it’s a huge part of why we’re not moving more quickly in a positive direction. These pig-headed neocons initiate arguments based on excruciatingly faulty premises and — rather than reject the premises — many otherwise good lefty arguers join the false debate.
This has to stop.
I was hanging out at Tbogg’s place earlier today, checking out comments on his response to Dan Riehl’s latest (“of course Bush made some mistakes, who wouldn’t, it’s a complex situation in a dangerous part of the world, whine whine whine”). A commenter (good-hearted and reasonable, I have no doubt) made what I would say is the mistake of taking Riehl’s argument at face value and engaging it — saying something like, “Yes, it’s complex and the mideast is dangerous, so Bush should have thought more carefully about how he proceeded, etc.”
To which I say, No, dammit! DO NOT accept the premises of the Dan Riehls of the world. The complex situation and the dangerousness of that part of the world were created by the actions of the Bush administration (or, in the most charitable terms possible, grossly exacerbated by them). We cannot allow them to continue to excuse horridly damaging actions by claiming as rationale the very conditions created by those actions.
I know, I know: What’s done is done. We can’t turn back time and un-invade Iraq. But that doesn’t mean we have to accept the premise that invading was OK and it was just handled badly.
This. War. Is. Wrong.
Gutting. The. Constitution. Is. Wrong.
We need to frame the debate.
Every time somebody accepts the premises of the Riehl world, an angel is shot in the face.
You’re right Mort, keep it simple, keep it true. Perhaps the addition of “We, the people, of America say…This war is wrong… Gutting the constitution is wrong… Putting troops in harms way because of a man’s ego is wrong… Advocating war, while sacrificing nothing is wrong…”
How long are we going to have to keep responding to the same mindless drivel? At what point will we no longer have to respond seriously to the same idiocy we were subjected to almost four years ago? Why is it that political blogs, an exciting and democratizing advance in public discourse, have turned into some kind of low IQ Groundhog Day?
Because those are the grounds that our opponents occupy and control much of the battlefield, and from which they fight. Rush Limbaugh has been selling the exact same line of bull (with slight temporal variants) for nigh-on twenty years now: liberals are faggots and traitors, over and over and over and over. They call it an echo chamber for a reason. Twenty years of Rush and his soundalikes repeating themselves over and over and over and over has given them the towering message advantage that they’ve used to argue that up is down, slavery is freedom, and war is peace. That’s what we’re up against, and it’s going to take a lot of repetition on our part (that these people are lying and full of shit and dangerous and killing Americans and making us less safe and bankrupting the country and so on and so on and over and over) to break the choke hold their ideas have on public discourse.
In a better world, we’d just have to document their lies and bullshit, and their credibility would collapse, and they’d be hounded out of public life in shame. But we don’t live in that world – media safeguards to weed out frauds and bullshit artists, never very strong to begin with, have collapsed in the last fifteen years (largely because of the integrated, repetitious right-wing noise machine) – so it’s up to us to keep proving these shitsocks wrong over and over and over and over.
It’s a tedious, repetitive, aggravating job, but it’s one we have to do if we’re ever to get this country pointed in the right direction again. I’m sure the staff writers of the Munich Advertiser were real tired of writing about what a fraud that Adolf Hitler guy was back in 1935, but they kept plugging away. We have to do the same.
Shitsocks. Right on, FMguru.
I like your thinking, His Grace. We gotta be like Caligula (well, in ritual if not in substance). He had that whole “In the name of the Senate and the People of Rome” thing going on (hey, at least Malcolm McDowell did in the movie). And who was it — Cato the Elder? — who ended every letter, every pronouncement, with “And I believe Carthage must be sacked’?
We need to flood the public discourse with “We the American people say . . . ” and pick our top five. The first two are easy: The war is wrong and must be ended now. The constitution must be restored and executive power curtailed. Now we just have to decide on the remaining three from among myriad possibilities and get the blast fax going. I know, blast faxes are tacky. But desperate times, y’know.
I think Stephen’s flux capacitor is broken. Either that, or he found a shitload of blow hidden in the upholstery of his DeLorean.
Repetition is their strategy, mikey. We’ve all seen this type of person. They pick a handful or arguments, and just rotate them around, timing the debate so that you never really get a chance to prove them wrong and stupid before everyone at the tea party moves down the table. Repeat as needed. After enough time has elapses that the publics’ attention span has erased most of the finer details, they start right back up at #1 again. Eventually, everyone only hears the arguments for them, and tone out the counter-arguments and reasons against it.
It’s debate by attrition and aggrivation, not reasons or logic. It plays up to the apathy and extremist nature of the public audience. Spin and smirk, spin and smirk, spin and smirk, parting shot annnnd that’s all the time we have, folks!
Much like a cult, that’s why it is so vital to the modern conservative movement to discredit and ridicule the “MSM”. It’s a platform for information and a forum of ideas that cannot be controlled, so it must be seen as the Great Outside Evil. You can’t trust them. You can only trust us. Only we understand you. Only we care about you. We are your new Family; we are your Real Family.
Right now, I feel like we’re at that part in Lord of the Flies, where the Fire is allowed to die because the boys in charge of it decided to hunt a pig instead.
“There was a plane! We would have been rescued!”
“We needed meat!”
Kill Piggy.
Valerie Plame shouldn’t have fucked with Tucker Carlson.
My thinking is that we are going to have to accept the fact that this is an ideological struggle with a group that has decided to jettison all the rules in favor of pandering to the basest fears and most self-serving attributes of the human race. While I would like to advocate taking the tack of reasoned, well- thought out responses to obviously rabid and blatantly untrue fairy tales, I think that in order to be truly heard by the majority of the population the psychology of fear and hatred need to be analyzed. When they have defined the atmosphere of debate as emotional, I have noticed that it is extremely hard to then de-escalate that emotion in most readers/viewers. Appeals to reason seem to not be heard by most, when thay have been sideswiped with a “If we don’t fight it there, we will be fighting it here”. Obviously, taking into account his current approval ratings, it finally did sink in that we were being played, but look at what he made us do! This tactic works really well for getting what you want out of alot of people. So I would like to put forth the question: What do you think should be our first line of defense against fear mongering?
Now that I’m reading that again- I’d like to make an adjustment. Look at what he got us to agree to do!
To return to the initial point- deliberate twisting of intelligence to promote an agenda is nothing new: anyone here remember Team B? 20 years ago i knew an ex-CIA analyst who was forced out of the agency because he saw the Tet offensive coming: he was analysing NVA/VC manpower, and saw that they were preparing to deploy reserves as front-line troops, which told him a major, country-wide attack was immanent- he raised the alarm, wouldn’t stop trying to get his superiors in the CIA and Defense and even the White House to pay attention; but at every level, he was told that he was wrong because we were winning, so the enemy couldn’t be gathering strength. The facts didn’t matter because they ran counter to the story that all the people that mattered had agreed on. Sound familiar?
Oh, and mikey? a lot of people would miss your deeply humane and eloquent voice if you took a break for even a day, but please go and do whatever it is that recharges your spirit, if you need to. Yeah, it’s heartbreaking to have the same old lies in your face over and over again- but they must be smacked down again every time, and you are particularly adept at that very necessary job.
Remember how all through the 90’s the Right flung poo at the last lawfully-elected president, until it became the common wisdom that, well gee, that Clinton guy is all covered in shit, must be something wrong with him? They will lie, slander and smear, and must be opposed and exposed with the same determination.
Smiling Mort,
Regarding “losing by fighting on their turf” I tried to address that recently, at least in terms of recognizing the pattern.
mikey,
I hear you, man. All I can say is, do what you need to do to keep yourself healthy. I’d rather miss having your comments for a week or a month than to see you burn out more permanently.
Recognize, too, that there are lots of ways to add to the conversation. SadNo focuses on wingiest wingnuts in all wingville; the assholes at the far end of the Overton window who, by advocating extremity, make anything short of that (no matter how brutal) seem acceptable. Given what you said, I can’t help wondering if you’ve spent too much time arguing against the dead-enders who must be refuted, but will never change no matter what anyone says.
Or perhaps, you might be feeling the effects of something I see going on across the lefty blogs, generally. Now that there are people in Washington whom we have some hope might listen to reason, there’s a real chance to effect things for the better. This is causing a sort of blogtopia-wide reshuffling as we move to advocating for things, rather than just trying to keep the fascist kutzu from totally choking the country we thought we knew.
I dunno, just some random thoughts. In hindsight I should’ve just gone for a poop joke.
There’s always the 85% solution, to borrow a particularly nasty wingnutism. If there are, as suggested, 15% who are genuinely committed to staying deluded, perhaps we should concentrate on persuading everyone else, gradually pushing outwards and sealing the wingnuts off from the mass of the population. Consider it as a form of counter-insurgency.
Then, they can be left happily flinging poo at each other around the kool-aid vat. It’s what happened to the Malayan Communists, you know – driven into deeper and deeper jungle, isolated from the people, the true believers were left to survive on ideological horseshit and enjoy various intestinal parasites, while Malaysia became a prosperous, if authoritarian, industrial state outside. Their leader, Chin Peng, didn’t come out of the jungle until 1989, but by then they had been irrelevant for thirty-five years.
Thanks for the link, kingubu. I hadn’t seen that post, and it’s terrific. You said it much, much better than I.