April 15, 2004

Perky Performance

P is for perpetual motion. As in the constant jabs and counter jabs between President Bush's critics and defenders. It's an election year so what else should we expect.

First, we have Oliver Willis still not understanding the difference between lying and being wrong. Bush wasn't even sure about the figure. He said, "By the way, they found, I think, 50 tons of mustard gas, I believe it was, in a turkey farm, only because he was willing to disclose where the mustard gas was. But that made the world safer" [emphasis mine]. In that situation, he should have just said that mustard gas was found. It was an error, not deception. Heck, there's a politician he likes who made a similar mistake, and I didn't jump on him for being a lying bastard.

Then we have the Heritage Foundation's Helle Dale's and James Phillips' response that pre-Sept. 11 intelligence agencies should have prevented the deadly attacks:

The point Dr. Rice hammered home is worth repeating here: Before September 11, there was no political will to reinvent the way intelligence was collected and shared between agencies within and without the United States. "The problem was that for a country that had not been attacked on its territory in a major way in almost 200 years," she said, "there were lots of structural impediments to those [changes].... Those changes should have been made over a long period of time."

"Setting the Record Straight: Condoleezza Rice and the 9/11 Commission"