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US: Iran not building nukes (pg. 3)
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| MisterOpus1 |
And what would the party be without the warmongering wingnuts going ape ?:
| quote: | I must confess to suspecting that the intelligence community, having been excoriated for supporting the then universal belief that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, is now bending over backward to counter what has up to now been a similarly universal view (including as is evident from the 2005 NIE, within the intelligence community itself) that Iran is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons. […]
But I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/b.../podhoretz/1474 |
Good ol' bat crazy Norman Podhoretz, Senior Foreign Policy advisor to Rudy Giuliani. Ain't he swell?
And I thought my tin foil hat was on too tight.
Oh, and how could we not have a leftist-intelligence-reality-based-community conspiracy against all those who are good neocons without Mr. Diplomacy himself, John Bolton:
| quote: | I really think the House and Senate Intelligence Committees have to look at how this NIE was put together because there are a lot unexplained points in here. […]
I think there is a risk here, and I raise this as a question, whether people in the intelligence community who had their own agenda on Iran for some time now have politicized this intelligence and politicized these judgments in a way contrary to where the administration was going. I think somebody needs to look at that.
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/12/04/bolton-nie-iran/ |
They're comin' to get 'cha. They're comin', John, you crazy ing loon......... |
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| Lebezniatnikov |
| quote: | Originally posted by MisterOpus1
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Podhoretz and Bolton can say whatever they want, but when the President stands at a microphone and says he didn't know this information despite having been briefed on it in August... it's no longer just a lie, it's a discredit to the entire United States of America. There are two things that strike me as amazing here - one, that the President is either incompetent or a liar, a fact that is now painfully obvious. And two, the fact that Ahmadinejad hasn't taken to the stage to gloat that he was telling the truth all along is an impressive show in restraint.
The National Intelligence Estimate doesn't just show that we've been wrong. It shows that every time this Administration has called the Iranian regime untrustworthy and disingenuous, they did so knowing that the Iranian regime was telling the truth. Which makes this lie even more sickening. As an American citizen, I am appalled. It is becoming so easy to see why a growing percentage of the world's population does not trust or particularly like the United States. |
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| atbell |
| quote: | Originally posted by Q5echo
no one is scared less thinking we (Amerikkka) are gonna use nukes except the s that want to get them. |
or anyone who has oil. |
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| Q5echo |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov
Podhoretz and Bolton can say whatever they want, but when the President stands at a microphone and says he didn't know this information despite having been briefed on it in August... it's no longer just a lie, it's a discredit to the entire United States of America. There are two things that strike me as amazing here - one, that the President is either incompetent or a liar, a fact that is now painfully obvious. And two, the fact that Ahmadinejad hasn't taken to the stage to gloat that he was telling the truth all along is an impressive show in restraint.
The National Intelligence Estimate doesn't just show that we've been wrong. It shows that every time this Administration has called the Iranian regime untrustworthy and disingenuous, they did so knowing that the Iranian regime was telling the truth. Which makes this lie even more sickening. As an American citizen, I am appalled. It is becoming so easy to see why a growing percentage of the world's population does not trust or particularly like the United States. |
i'm afraid it's not that simple. it never is.
NYT
| quote: | December 5, 2007
New Data, New Methods, New Conclusion
By MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON, Dec. 4 — How could American intelligence agencies have overstated Iran’s intentions in 2005 so soon after being reprimanded for making similar errors involving Iraq?
The spy agencies had swallowed hard and pledged to do better after a presidential commission in March 2005 issued a blistering accounting of the intelligence failures leading to the Iraq war.
But a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that was issued two months later said Iran’s leaders were working tirelessly to acquire a nuclear weapon — a finding that, like the prewar intelligence on Iraq, has now been acknowledged to have been wrong in one of its chief conclusions.
Current and former intelligence officials insist that much of the 2005 Iran report still holds up to scrutiny.
At the same time, they acknowledge that in retrospect, some of its conclusions appear to have been thinly sourced and were based on methods less rigorous than were ultimately required under an intelligence overhaul that did not begin in earnest until later.
It was also written by some of the same team that had produced key parts of the flawed Iraq estimate. Robert D. Walpole oversaw both reports as the national intelligence officer responsible for assessing illicit-weapons programs.
Robert Hutchings, who as head of the National Intelligence Council from 2003 to early 2005 oversaw early production of the 2005 Iran assessment, said the quality of information about Iran’s nuclear program should have made American intelligence analysts wary of judging anything with “high confidence.” That was how the 2005 report described the basis for its assertion that Iran was determined to develop nuclear weapons, a conclusion that has been disavowed.
“The fact that we’ve reversed course two years later suggests that the high confidence back then wasn’t warranted,” said Mr. Hutchings, who had left the intelligence council by the time the intelligence estimate was produced in May 2005.
Paul R. Pillar, another member of the National Intelligence Council in 2005, said it was a “fair point” to criticize intelligence agencies for overstating their confidence in the judgments of the 2005 estimate. But he said the judgment that Iran is determined to obtain the bomb could prove correct in the long run.
The intelligence agencies’ 2005 finding that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapons program was consistent with strong warnings about Iran issued at the time by Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and John R. Bolton, then the under secretary of state. But there has been no indication that policy makers sought in any way to influence the agencies’ conclusions on Iran, which like all intelligence assessments are supposed to be immune from political pressure.
The officials said that the 2007 estimate was an attempt by spy agencies to examine the Iran problem in a new light, and that in the process they recast many of their principal judgments about Iran’s weapons programs that might have relied on outdated information.
Some sources used for the 2005 estimate were discarded for the new report, and some old information that intelligence agencies did not use for the 2005 estimate was re-examined and included in the estimate released Monday.
The new intelligence estimate concludes with “high confidence” that Iran halted work on its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called it “puzzling” and “disturbing” that intelligence agencies in 2005 could produce a flawed estimate so soon after what he called the Iraq “debacle.”
Government officials who have read both estimates said the 2005 report was filled with analysis based on somewhat murky knowledge of Iran’s capabilities and the goals of its leaders. They said the new intelligence estimate contained very specific information to back up unusually confident conclusions about the state of Iran’s weapons program.
Government officials said the new judgments were grounded largely in information from human sources that is buttressed by other information gathered by spy satellites and communications intercepts.
John E. McLaughlin, the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2000 to 2004 and the acting director for two months in 2004, said the agencies’ shifting view between 2005 and 2007 simply showed how difficult intelligence was to get right.
“In 2005, what we had was what we had,” Mr. McLaughlin said. “I think people should take comfort from the fact that they’ve changed their view.”
Over the past year, officials have put into place rigorous new procedures for analyzing conclusions about difficult intelligence targets like Iran, North Korea, global terrorism and China.
Analysts from disparate spy agencies are no longer pushed to achieve unanimity in their conclusions, a process criticized in the past for leading to “groupthink.” Alternate judgments are now encouraged.
In the case of the 2007 Iran report, “red teams” were established to test and find weaknesses in the report’s conclusions. Counterintelligence officials at the C.I.A. also did an extensive analysis to determine whether the new information might have been planted by Tehran to throw the United States off the trail of Iran’s nuclear program.
One result was an intelligence report that some of the intelligence community’s consistent critics have embraced.
“Just possibly, the intelligence community may have taken a major step forward,” Senator Rockefeller said.
Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington.
>LINK<
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WaPo
| quote: | Lessons of Iraq Aided Intelligence On Iran
Officials Cite New Caution And a Surge in Spying
By Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, December 5, 2007; A01
The starkly different view of Iran's nuclear program that emerged from U.S. spy agencies this week was the product of a surge in clandestine intelligence-gathering in Iran as well as radical changes in the way the intelligence community analyzes information.
Drawing lessons from the intelligence debacle over supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell required agencies to consult more sources and to say to a larger intelligence community audience precisely what they know and how they know it -- and to acknowledge, to a degree previously unheard of, what they do not know.
" 'Do not know' is a new technical term for an NIE," said a senior official who was involved in preparation of the report, known as a National Intelligence Estimate.
While intelligence officials say the new conclusion about the Iranian program proved that the reforms were sound, the wide gap between Monday's report and previous assessments also left the agencies vulnerable to accusations that officials had failed for too long to grasp a fundamental change in course by Iran's leaders.
The new report upended years of previous assessments by asserting that the Islamic republic halted the weapons side of its nuclear program in 2003. The report, while expressing concern about Iran's rapidly growing civilian nuclear energy program, contradicted assertions by top Bush administration officials and previous intelligence assessments that Iran has been bent on acquiring nuclear weapons.
"The new report brings the U.S. intelligence community in line with what the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] and several European governments were saying years ago," said David Albright, a former United Nations weapons inspector and president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security.
In 2005, a National Intelligence Estimate had said Iran was "determined" to acquire nuclear weapons, a view that meshed with the foreign policy of an administration that in 2002 declared Iran to be part of an "axis of evil." But former and current U.S. intelligence officials said the flaws in that report reflected only the extreme difficulty of penetrating Iran's nuclear program.
"It's the hardest damn target out there -- harder than North Korea," said an intelligence official who contributed to the report. "This is a program they tried very hard to hide from us, and it was hard even to fathom who was in charge."
The 2005 report's assertions that Iran was secretly working on nuclear weapons turned out to be accurate, but dated. Ellen Laipson, former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said the earlier judgment was based on credible information that may have been the best available at the time.
"It's not getting it wrong, it's that [the intelligence] collection may have been insufficient," said Laipson, now president of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a defense think tank. "It takes years to know the truth."
A pivotal moment occurred in early summer 2005, when President Bush discussed the new Iran NIE with advisers during a routine intelligence briefing. Why, he asked, was it so hard to get information about Iran's nuclear program?
The exchange, described by a senior U.S. official who witnessed it, helped instigate the intelligence community's most aggressive attempt to penetrate Iran's highly secretive nuclear program. Over the coming months, the CIA established a new Iran Operations Division that brought analysts and clandestine collectors together to search for hard evidence.
Communications intercepts of Iranian nuclear officials and a stolen Iranian laptop containing diagrams related to the development of a nuclear warhead for missiles both yielded valuable evidence about Iran's nuclear past as well as its decision in 2003 to suspend the weapons side of its program.
But there was no "eureka" moment, according to senior officials who helped supervise the collection efforts. The surge in intelligence-gathering helped convince analysts that Iran had made a "course correction" in 2003, halting the weapons work while proceeding with the civilian nuclear energy program.
The result, ironically, was a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that reached conclusions far different from what many intelligence officials expected.
"One reason this is actually an intelligence success is that when we got additional information that could lead to a different conclusion, we had an ability to move in that direction," said a senior intelligence official involved in the drafting process.
Former and current intelligence officials say the new NIE reflects new analytical methods ordered by McConnell -- who took the DNI job in January -- and his deputies, including Thomas Fingar, a former head of the State Department's intelligence agency, and Donald M. Kerr, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and an expert on nuclear weapons technology.
Besides requiring greater transparency about the sources of intelligence, McConnell and his colleagues have compelled analysts working on major estimates to challenge existing assumptions when new information does not fit, according to former and current U.S. officials familiar with the policies.
The report also reflects what several officials described yesterday as a new willingness by the intelligence community to analyze intentions in addition to capabilities. While Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity to make nuclear weapons, including knowledge of how to enrich uranium to a level usable in bombs, the new intelligence collected through intercepted communications raised doubts about Iran's intended use of the technology.
As McConnell said in a Nov. 14 speech, it "inserted some new questions" that made the community go back and review the conventional wisdom about Iran. It also shed light on Iran's susceptibility to international diplomatic pressure -- a large factor in Tehran's decision to cut off research on building a bomb, analysts concluded.
McConnell said his objective in preparing the Iran estimate was "to present the clinical evidence and let it stand on its own merits with its own qualification," meaning that it would contain dissent. "There are always disagreements on every National Intelligence Estimate," he said.
He and other officials jettisoned a requirement that each conclusion in an NIE reflect a consensus view of the intelligence community -- a requirement that in the past yielded "lowest-common-denominator judgments," said one senior intelligence official familiar with the reforms.
"We demolished democracy" by no longer reflecting just a majority opinion, "because we felt we should not be determining the credibility of analytic arguments by a raising of hands," the official said. Some analysts, for example, were not "highly confident" that Iran has not restarted its nuclear program, a result reflected in the classified report. Other analysts said Iran was further away from attaining a nuclear weapons capability than the majority said.
DNI officials also pressed for a broader array of intelligence sources, including news accounts and other "open sources" that traditionally had carried little weight inside intelligence agencies. In the case of Iran, critical information was gleaned from non-clandestine sources, such as news photographs taken in 2005 depicting the inner workings of one of Iran's uranium enrichment plants, an official said.
Those photos helped persuade analysts that the Natanz plant was suited to making low-enriched uranium for nuclear energy but not the highly enriched uranium needed for bombs. "You go to wherever you think the answer might be," the official said, "instead of waiting for it to trickle into your top-secret computer system."
Several top officials said McConnell and others were determined to avoid a repetition of the intelligence community's very public failures in assessing Iraq's weapons programs. Not only were its analytical judgments wrong -- U.S. forces in Iraq never found the chemical or biological weapons that the CIA said they would -- but the agency relied on sources known to be suspect or even discredited.
For instance, U.S. claims that Iraq had built mobile biological weapons laboratories were based on more than 100 reports from a single source, an Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball" whom U.S. officials never interviewed in person. After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, investigators concluded that Curveball's stories were fabrications.
Then-CIA director George J. Tenet initiated some of the reforms in the wake of the Curveball debacle, but Fingar and McConnell added to them and spread them across the intelligence community, officials said.
>LINK<
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how do some you shallow thinking, hate-bush-at-all-costs noise makers reconcile these two explainations with some of the rhetoric posted in this thread? it's easy to call Bush a liar, but the rest of us rational people that don't get caught up in the Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermans of the world that global strategic intelligence gathering not that simple.
and a another thing A-Jad is being quiet and smarter now because the last thing he wants is more attention on this and they prolly had no idea we've come so far in our accuracy.
Bush did something right in 2003 and he's simply going to keep applying pressure. it's that simple. |
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| Q5echo |
Revisionism and The Iranian Non-Bomb [Victor Davis Hanson]
The latest news from Iran about the supposed abandonment in 2003 of the effort to produce a Bomb — if even remotely accurate — presents somewhat of a dilemma for liberal Democrats.
Are they now to suggest that Republicans have been warmongering over a nonexistent threat for partisan purposes? But to advance that belief is also to concede that Iran, like Libya, likely came to a conjecture (around say early spring 2003?) that it was not wise for regimes to conceal WMD programs, given the unpredictable, but lethal American military reaction.
After all, what critic would wish now to grant that one result of the 2003 war — aside from the real chance that Iraq can stabilize and function under the only consensual government in the region — might have been the elimination, for some time, of two growing and potentially nuclear threats to American security, quite apart from Saddam Hussein?
War is unpredictable and instead of "no blood for oil" (oil went from $20 something to $90 something a barrel after the war, enriching Iraq and the Arab Gulf region at our expense), perhaps the cry, post facto, should have been "no blood for the elimination of nukes."
In the meantime, expect a variety of rebuttals to this assurance that for 4 years the Iranians haven't gotten much closer to producing weapons grade materials. |
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| George Smiley |
| quote: | Originally posted by Q5echo
thats great you hate America. Bravo. way to stand out from the crowd Georgie, but i'll let you in on a little secret. no one is scared less thinking we (Amerikkka) are gonna use nukes except the s that want to get them. i'm pretty sure the rest of the world would rather have it that way than the other way around. |
I think this was my point exactly. Instead of facing (valid) criticism of your country's policies you go straight on the offensive to "blindly support" America. I obviously don't hate America or Americans, yet the fact that that is your only come back to criticism of your country suggests there is an air of truth in what I say... |
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| George Smiley |
:D
You couldn't make it up could ya?! |
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| Q5echo |
| quote: | Originally posted by atbell
or anyone who has oil. |
yeah the Cannuks and Mexicans are shivering in their boots.
...the other whopping 6% of all the oil used in this country comes from Saudi Arabia. thye're not afraid.
please think deeper and beyond left-wing talking points and propaganda, or your'e no less a sheep than i |
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| Q5echo |
| quote: | Originally posted by George Smiley
I obviously don't hate America or Americans, yet the fact that that is your only come back to criticism of your country suggests there is an air of truth in what I say... |
you want "air"? you got air George. there is some truth. thats the inherent ideological downfall of defending my side of the Bush Doctine. we make difficult and sometimes lethal decisions and ideologically we live with them. but let me remind you of just exactly whom we are dealing with, and not some fancifull hypothetical. |
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| MisterOpus1 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Q5echo
Revisionism and The Iranian Non-Bomb [Victor Davis Hanson]x`
After all, what critic would wish now to grant that one result of the 2003 war — aside from the real chance that Iraq can stabilize and function under the only consensual government in the region — might have been the elimination, for some time, of two growing and potentially nuclear threats to American security, quite apart from Saddam Hussein?[/color]
War is unpredictable and instead of "no blood for oil" (oil went from $20 something to $90 something a barrel after the war, enriching Iraq and the Arab Gulf region at our expense), perhaps the cry, post facto, should have been "no blood for the elimination of nukes."
In the meantime, expect a variety of rebuttals to this assurance that for 4 years the Iranians haven't gotten much closer to producing weapons grade materials.[/size] |
Well since we're going into quoting slanted, partisan opinions, allow me to post a reply in the same fashion:
| quote: | (1) Read this (2) Stab self in eye with fork (3) Repeat
The rightwing media long ago abandoned any kind of pretense to reason or truth, and thereby proved in a few short years that the flinching tittybabies of 9/11 Nation will gobble up whatever gift-wrapped turd is dangled before their maws, as long as it makes them feel entitled to remain epically wrong. Now, finally, an experiment that appears designed to test the hypothesis that maybe you don't even need to spend the money to gift-wrap that turd!
| quote: | The latest news from Iran about the supposed abandonment in 2003 of the effort to produce a Bomb — if even remotely accurate — presents somewhat of a dilemma for liberal Democrats.
Are they now to suggest that Republicans have been warmongering over a nonexistent threat for partisan purposes? But to advance that belief is also to concede that Iran, like Libya, likely came to a conjecture (around say early spring 2003?) that it was not wise for regimes to conceal WMD programs, given the unpredictable, but lethal American military reaction. |
I mean, wow. You just have to marvel at these people. Victor Davis Hanson, I ing salute you, and I ing surrender. For it is no longer possible to engage you in debate. You have slipped the surly bonds of reality, and rocketed headlong into a Ren and Stimpy episode.
And me without my rubber nipples.
As I futiley attempt to keep strands of my gelatinized mind from oozing through my fingers, I see that you have posited above that the revelation that Iran's nuclear program has been sidetracked since 2003 is really a problem for Democrats, and not Republicans or Bush. And you know, I'm okay with that so far. My mind can process the reality that Democrats have a certain mystical "abraca-pocus" when it comes to making Bush's problems their problems.
But to posit that we should credit Bush's Iraq war for the fact that Iran has no nuclear weapons is simply an historically unprecedented stroke of cartoonish brilliance. It is so cartoonishly brilliant, in fact, that all I can equate it to is the moment when The Grinch tells Cindy Loo Who that he's taking her Christmas tree away so he can fix a light that isn't working right.
I am confident that there are no one-word descriptors in the English language for what you have achieved here. "Mendacious" and "audacious" are both directionally correct, but fall so far short of capturing the true essence as to be non-starters. No, we need a new word entirely for this.
"Omnious?"
"Pancraptic?"
"Transcatalogical?"
Nope. Still not good enough.
| quote: | | After all, what critic would wish now to grant that one result of the 2003 war — aside from the real chance that Iraq can stabilize and function under the only consensual government in the region — might have been the elimination, for some time, of two growing and potentially nuclear threats to American security, quite apart from Saddam Hussein? |
Who, indeed, Victor Davis Hanson. Who, indeed.
This is where we are, folks. This is what the Republican media is reduced to serving up. And in a way, I honestly think it's brilliant. It is brilliant, because you can't find as much as a toehold. You can't argue with Hanson anymore than you can argue with a streetwalking schizophrenic who insists the Neptunians are speaking to him from special antennae in his shoelaces.
It's over, folks. They won. I throw in the towel. The rhetorical Pac Man machine of politics has been bested, and all that's left to do now is stare at the pretty pixels.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/12/4/145513/210 |
Just shine that turd a little brighter. I promise if you shine it hard enough it will become a diamond! |
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| MisterOpus1 |
I love Rude Pundit. Here's a bit of live-blogging of Bush's Press Conference the other day:
| quote: | 12/04/2007
Live Vodka-Blogging the President's Press Conference:
Once more, President Bush has announced a last second press conference. So, once again, the Rude Pundit has gone into the freezer to get out another trusty bottle of Chopin vodka, the finest vodka for times like these, when the Siberian winds are blowing up skirts here in the chilled Northeast. All quotes pretty much guaranteed not to be word accurate. But the spirit is there.
10:01: There he is, jumping right in with a gentle caress of the Congress's face on some Peruvian trade legislation before the slap. Here it comes: "Our troops are waiting on Congress to fund 'em," which conjures the image of soldiers sitting on a log somewhere with tin cups, wondering if they'll ever get another MRE.
10:04: For some bizarro reason, he keeps referring to an omnibus budget bill as a "monster bill," as if this has not been done with surprising regularity by Presidents like, um, Reagan. And then, in an image every child needs, he invokes the big guy: "Santa [will have] slipped down their chimney before Congress finishes its work."
10:05: First question and it's right into the National Intelligence Estimate on how Iran ain't buildin' nukes. Bush says, "We know that they're still trying to learn how to enrich uranium, we know that enriching uranium is an important step in a country whose desire is to..." Holy Christ, we're down to Iran gaining knowledge as a way of defining their evil evilness? He views the report as a warning signal that they could "restart" the program. Man, he's got no enthusiasm for this Iran discussion. It's like he thrust his hard-on in Laura's face and she just slapped that Vienna sausage out of her way.
10:07: Wants to compliment intelligence community for its good work on Iran. Hey, take that, Norman Podhoretz, plaintively mewling into the uncaring wilderness about how can we trust the intelligence now since they were wrong about Iraq.
10:09: David Gregory is going for Bush's nutsack: Are you hyping the Iranian threat? "I was made aware of the NIE last week." Apparently, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell didn't tell Bush what the new information was, just that there was new information. What the ? Is he the goddamn President or the low girl on the text message circle about whether or not the new hot boy at school is gay?
10:11: Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge to make a weapon, he reiterates. What the does that even mean? No, really, what the ?
10:12: George W. Bush giving advice on how the world can remain peaceful is not unlike a lion with gum disease telling an antelope to slow the down so they can just talk.
10:14: Bush says that nobody told him to back down on the rhetoric on Iran. "My opinion hasn't changed," he says, in the wake of the NIE. Sometimes the Rude Pundit wonders what it must be like for a Bush supporter to watch this and believe anything this tiny little man says.
10:15: Wait, what? The long pole in the tent? Is he talking about his pants? Anyways...seriously, how can you watch this and not think, "Damn, we are so intensely ed for the next year, at least." 'Cause, at this point, if you're a Bush fan, you gotta hope that Iran is super-secret gonna try to get some kind of knowledge that'll lead it to build nukes so we can bomb the out of another country. And thus you are insane, too.
10:19: He's asked, "What goes through your mind when you hear about a Saudi woman getting gang-raped?" You just know he's wondering how he can get some of that hot sand ****** action...oh, wait, no, he's wondering how he'd feel if it was his daughter. And he's wondering how he can get some of that hot Barbara action.
10:22: If you're keeping your vodka in the freezer, a handy tip is to make sure that the cap is tight on the bottle. Otherwise, any odors in there will get into the taste. You could also keep your freezer clean.
10:24: Bush is talking about the old days of mortgages like everyone had the power to go to the bank to re-negotiate rates. Which was awesome if you were white and middle class in 1962.
10:25: He's being challenged on the whole "knowledge" thing, how knowledge to build weapons is not part of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The Rude Pundit's betting that reporter is not getting an answer. Aaaannnnd...no. Not gonna address the treaty. He's just gonna simian-sign, "Iran bad," and toss at the cameras like he's President Koko.
10:28: Disturbing things you never want to hear your President say: "Here's why it's hard."
10:30: This press conference's straw man: the vaguely defined person who thinks that the NIE means everyone needs to believe that Iran is just hunky-dory and we should stop paying attention to them. So it's either brinkmanship or blinders. Nothing in between.
10:33: Oh, , here's paranoid prez coming out: sometimes people say what he said is not what he said. So he won't tell what he said to Putin because he doesn't like it when people say what he said, which might not be what he said. Oh, and Iran's still bad.
10:36: Disturbing things you never want to hear your President say, part 2: On the campaign plane, "My friend Candy Crowley passed a virus around."
10:38: Bush says, "The most disappointing thing about Washington has been the name-calling...I've tried to be respectful to all parties." Which is not unlike a jailhouse rapist saying the most disappointing thing is when his punks don't clean his cell well enough.
10:40: He's talking about relations with Congress one minute and then he goes all bat about funding the troops. It's like for a second he got reflective and moderate, and then caught himself.
10:41: Bush is asked if he's facing a credibility gap with the American people. He dismisses it outright, says he is feeling "spirited." And then talks about how dangerous Iran is.
10:43: Aw, , this vodka is disappearing fast and now this goddamn President is yelling at the Rude Pundit about Iran. He's in' pissed that the reporter said something about his body language. He's a man of peace, don't you see? And "Psychology 101 ain't workin'." And he's out.
Whoa, methinks he just stormed off. Angry that the reporters would dare think he's not been working to make sure their families are not nuked by non-existent Iranian weapons. Don't we get it? He's right. Everyone else in the world and in half of his administration and Congress is wrong. And if we can't see his innate rightness, then we can all go ourselves.
Now, someone tell the Rude Pundit why anyone anywhere should trust this man?
http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2007...ents-press.html |
President Koko. Holy God that's funny. |
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| Krypton |
| Wow, I've been listening to the AM right wing radio, and they are just trying to blast the credibility of their own country's intelligence agencies. Really does show how "stay the course" is such a blinding philosophy. That's all they can do because it just flies in the face the Rush Limbaugh apologists..:o |
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