Ken Mehlman, on Meet the Press today, has gotten some high marks from some right-leaning blogs today, but I got a different impression. Here's a quick snip:
Tim Russert: ... the suggestion is that the Administration cherry-picked intelligence, shared with the public the most dramatic, and did not give them any of the caveats. The President talked about "the mushroom cloud" when in fact there was no hard evidence that Saddam had or was on his way to developing a nuclear program.
Ken Mehlman: Did Hilary Clinton cherry-pick? Did Bill Clinton cherry-pick? Did Jay Rockefeller cherry-pick? Every one of these Democratic Senators... Did John Kerry cherry-pick? They all talked about the same things, and they all saw the same evidence.
Tim Russert: John Edwards today said that he was wrong to vote for the war because he now realizes that the evidence was wrong. When you ask George Bush, knowing what he knows today, would he still do the same thing he said, "Yes, I'd still go to war," even without knowing about weapons of mass destruction.
Ken Mehlman: Absolutely. And the reason he said that was the question I asked a minute ago: would we be safer if we waited? The lesson of 9/11 is that we don't wait until after the attack to respond. Think about what the last 30 years has proved to us. For 30 years terrorists have made war on the West, and for 30 years we've responded after the fact, and the attacks have gotten worse and worse. What happened on September 12th is that this President concluded that you win the war being on the offensive, and that America's at war, and that the President is absolutely right: if we had waited until he had weapons of mass destruction we'd be much less safe than if we'd gotten rid of him when we did.
We'll put aside the fact that Russert still lets him get away with these kind of blatantly false statements. Saddam didn't have and wasn't getting weapons of mass destruction -- and the bald-faced contradictions that, in the middle of a discussion that, for whatever reasons, the evidence surrounding Saddam's non-existent WMD programs was false, Mehlman still says that we had to stop him from getting weapons, weapons that they said he already had, because we can't wait until he gets them.
He just blew my mind.
But, perhaps more importantly, it appears that the Republican party is out of new plays. They've simply returned to outrageously connecting 9/11 to the Iraq war. This is, of course, a connection that the President himself has admitted never existed, but continued to (and, apparently still does) obfuscate with the idea of just such a connection.
But that was back when the President was still riding his war-time high polls. Today, as new polls show the President has a 36% approval rating (even more damning, the Republican controlled congress has a 28% approval rating. And, just for giggles, only 29% of those polled thing that Dick Cheney is honest and ethical), I'm simply not convinced the public is buying this line anymore.
Comments