THE BOY WHO CRIED NUKES

There's a lot of great stuff flying through the liberal blogosphere offering talking points to those who are in a position to be sources for journalists or to appear on pundit shows.

John Aravosis at AmericaBlog is doing an outstanding job with this, and Bill Scher had good points over at the Huffington Post.

But I think the title of this blog entry might help us get our point across to the public (and to the MSM, as they need schooling on this as much if not more than "the public") as good as anything. Why? It's eminently familiar, you get the meaning right away, it's derisive without being obnoxious--it's the answer to "flip-flop." It rolls right off the tongue--"Bush is the boy who cried nukes," obviously referring to the fact that we were warned of "mushroom clouds" coming out of aluminum tubes before invading Iraq even though the CIA knew there were no nukes (see "State Of War") and sure enough, there weren't any.

I don't want to make too much of it, but I think it works, i.e.:

PUNDIT SHOW HOST: Some experts say that Iran could have a nuclear weapon in 16 days.

LIBERAL GUEST: We have to realize that Bush is "the boy who cried nukes." Look at his track record on this stuff--we now know for certain that Iraq didn't have nuclear weapons but the Bush administration sure worked hard to create the impression that they did. That's what they're doing now with because Bush's popularity is dropping like a rock (no pun intended), and they need something to help them keep control of Congress in November. So people should remember that Bush can't be trusted--he's "the boy who cried nukes."

And so forth.


Who Will Talk About These Points?

As I said, I really appreciate the talking points from Aravosis and Scher, but who is going to use them? Will Harry Reid or Ted Kennedy? Howard Dean is very likely to, I'm guessing. But our problem is that the Democrats don't get their act together on this kind of thing very often. We need our guys and gals on every pundit show every day of the week all saying one simple, catch-all explanatory phrase
like "Bush is the boy who cried nukes--we took his word on Iraq and you see what a mess that's become--why would we do it all over again with Iran? We've got ten years to deal with this according to Bush's own NIE."

An Aside

Truthfully, this entire assumption that we can tell other countries whether or not they can or cannot have nuclear weapons is irksome, us being the only country that's ever used them in war, whether blatantly like in Japan or more stealthily, with depleted uranium.

It's morally repugnant, is all. And hypocritical.


Comment on HuffPo and AmBlog

I wanted to spread this idea, so I posted the following in the comments at HuffPo and AmBlog:

"Bush is the boy who cried nukes"

If every liberal or Democratic pundit would repeat that pithy phrase, or any other pithy, sort of juvenile phrase that gets our point across about why Bush can't be trusted with "intelligence" at this point, I think that'd be useful. And unfortunately probably more effective than earnest recitations of the facts.

Because it takes a pithy, juvenile phrase to reach the public, and also, apparently, the mainstream media--the MSM loves that kind of snarky, junior-high taunting shit, i.e., "flip-flop."

Just a suggestion...