A better.shorter version of our thoughts.
Every once in awhile I despair that the Dems don’t really have a shot in the election, and then I see a story like this one.
Ah, record deficits, ever-soring cost estimates, members of his own party furious with his economic stewardship….thanks, George. It takes a special Republican to lose the upper hand on the economy, but he’s pulled it off.
It’s time for the Dems to shut up about health care and start hammering away at this.
The Denver Post has a bit of digging up the past this morning as it recalls Dean’s days in Aspen during the early ’70s. Among the better reminisences:
“From the restaurant owner who employed Dean and remembered him as a pot-smoking ‘loser’….”
Also questions about his supposed medical deferment from Vietnam “when he paid $250 for a ski pass and claimed to have been on the slopes 80 days” after receiving the deferment.
“It’s nice to think that an assistant dishwasher can run for president.”
“GREENVILLE, S.C. - The Democratic presidential contenders were converging on South Carolina on Thursday, campaigning in the state ahead of their only debate before Tuesday’s primaries here and in six other states.”
They asked me to moderate, to give it a “local flavor”, but I politely declined. I told them to call Brokaw.
Tony Blair has been completely vindicated in connection with the allegations that he and his government “sexed up” the July 2003 intelligence dossier, which indicated, among other things, that Iraq was prepared to deploy WMD in 45 minutes. It was the BBC, in fact, that lied, and Gavyn Davies, Chairman of the BBC, resigned yesterday.
As to Frampton’s suggestion that the Administration should not have played up the WMD aspect over the humanitarian reasons, Jonah Goldberg argues in The Corner that it was the State Department (read: not the Defense Department) that pushed the WMD angle, because State Department lawyers argued that WMD was the only legal justifaction under “international law.” Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle all along minimized the importance of WMD and in fact made a much broader case for deposing Saddam.
As you point out, we may have had a massive intelligence failure. (We still don’t know, and David Kay suggests that some weapons programs may have been moved to Syria.) But the anti-war zealots’ conspiracy theories that “Bush Lied!” are both factually incorrect and completely illogical. After all, such a lie would have required the cooperation of the Blair government, to say nothing of the fact that Bush Administration intelligence was entirely consistent with the intelligence gathered by his predecessor, who, it should be noted, has remained on the sidelines in the Bush Lied debate.
Finally, note the dignity with which Tony Blair yesterday rebuffed those who so viciously attacked him: “I ask that those that have repeatedly claimed that I lied over this issue . . . now withdraw that allegation . . . unequivocally and in full.”
UPDATE: Now, initial reports are circulating that Jacques Chirac was bribed with Iraqi oil money. Funny, they were right, but about the wrong guy: It was all about the oil.
Even Better Thoughts