INTELLIGENCE AND FACTS...

So I'm lying in bed this morning thinking about the letter to the editor I wrote yesterday, pointing out that even though Bush said that the pre-war intelligence "turned out to be wrong," you shouldn't believe him. Then I cited the Powell/Rice quotes, talked about the recent National Journal article, talked about Hussein Kamel and how Bush was obviously aware of him because he used Kamel as a source in a speech. The intelligence Bush received before the war was right, and he was wrong.

But his sudden "admission" of being "wrong" bothered me. I knew there had to be an ulterior motive but I just couldn't quite put my finger on it. But it hit me like a bolt of lightning this morning in bed.

Hope this makes sense...

Bush and the Republicans will now try to turn a supposed humble admission that the Iraq intelligence was wrong but we were right to go into Iraq into a cudgel like they did with the term "liberal media" or "liberal media bias." In other words, they're trying to create the meme that we can't trust the facts (i.e., the "intelligence") in a given situation, but we can always trust them. That's why Bush felt like he could say some intelligence turned out to be wrong, because he immediately followed that statement with one about how he was right to go into Iraq anyway.

Noise Machine

And that's what David Brock and others have been pointing out that the Republicans have been doing for decades now--turning objective facts into just another political opinion. That's what they did with their most successful canard, the myth of the "liberal media." Anytime some solid, factual reporting conflicts with what the conservatives are trying to prove, they'll say in essence "who are you gonna believe, me and your gut or the liberal media."

And that shit has worked like a charm...

And so that's what Bush has been doing all along, like with Social Security. Bush said it would be bankrupt in a number of years and that it needed to be fixed, meanwhile all the numbers coming from the SS trustees and the CBO basically proved that what Bush was saying was wildly off the mark. But Bush said we should trust him, not the facts.

So the writer of the famous Downing Street minutes really captured something when he pointed out that "the facts and intelligence were being fixed around the policy" of going to war with Iraq. That is undoubtedly true, and that becomes clearer with each passing week. But I had never thought about that description applying to everything Bush tries to do. But it is very apt. Because the facts and intelligence are nearly always against Bush and corporatists. So they try to discredit the facts by simply saying "the intelligence was wrong, but I was right."

That is dangerous notion that far too many people buy into...