Month: July 2004

From Silent Running:

Wilson was interviewed by Margaret Warner, who at one point was almost trying to help him out by throwing him a ‘possible wording’ but Wilson even discarded that and flailed away in the face of direct exposure from Senator Kit Bond. Senator Bond read almost directly from the Senate Intelligence report, and cited the Butler Inquiry conclusions. He summarized by stating that Wilson was a liar, and owed the President and Vice President an apology.

Hmmm…..But Wilson has a good defense, if he wants to use it: he’s a liar, but at least he’s not a spy.

I’m off to Japan for a week of meetings, so I don’t expect to be posting much until I get back. I can recommend all the blogs in the right-hand column, especially Blogs for Bush, Roger L. Simon, Terrorism Unveiled, Red State, and The Fat Guy.

Simon has done yeoman’s work covering the Lyin’ Joe Wilson story, and I hope that it continues to unfold in the days to come. The blogger triumphalism that emerged following the downfall of Trent Lott has suffered a major blow in the failure of Big Media to follow the lead of bloggers in exposing Wilson for what it is, lending credence to my theory that Trent Lott was primarily a product of Democratic activist Sid Blumenthal acting through Josh Marshall. The Democratic Party blogs (Marshall, Atrios, Kos, and Kevin Drum) are shying away from the Wilson story because he’s their man and the centerpiece of the “Bush lied, people died” hysteria.

As they will continue to do that, we’ll see whether the center and right blogs have the power to make the media go where it doesn’t want to go in the next few days.

I watched Fahrenheit 9/11 today, after downloading it for free with BitTorrent (more about that later) and I have to say it’s even worse than I thought: a completely cynical exercise in the exploitation of simple minds. As a piece of conspiracy theater, it’s much less convincing than Oliver Stone’s JFK, and as a polemic it’s weaker than any given episode of South Park. I fail to see how anyone can sit through it without laughing uproariously.

It claims that Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings take their orders from a consultant at Fox News, that presidential weekends with Tony Blair are “vacations”, that the Coalition of the Willing was formed exclusively by ethnically colorful simpletons, that the war in Afghanistan was for a pipeline, and that the Iraqis lived an idyllic life under Saddam. Somehow Moore managed to cover the length and breadth of 9/11 without showing planes crashing into the WTC.

Only a fool of immense proportions could take it seriously.

Joe Wilson’t reaction to the exposure of his three big lies about Saddam’s efforts to buy uranium in Niger and the Congo is to go into hiding; nobody’s seen the normally camera-hungry employee of the Kerry Campaign on TV for a couple of weeks. The reaction of the liberal media is to either to pretend he never existed or to publish mild stories in the back pages about disputed testimony.

Democratic partisans are similarly split, with some playing dumb (“what’s the big deal here?“) and others circling the wagons and trying to mount an actual defense, as odd as that seems.

So how do you defend a guy who’s been caught lying on three major issues:

1. He was recommended for a CIA mission in Africa by his wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame; he said she had nothing to do with it. (see Novak: “Plame sent out an internal CIA memo saying ”my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.” A State Department analyst told the committee about an inter-agency meeting in 2002 that was ”apparently convened by [Wilson’s] wife, who had the idea to dispatch [him] to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger uranium issue.””

2. His mission in Africa concerned the narrow question of whether anyone wanted to admit to selling uranium to Saddam illegally; Wilson said he learned enough to assert that Saddam never had tried to buy uranium.

3. Wilson said the President’s 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address on uranium were a lie, but they’ve been confirmed by the Butler report.

It turns out it’s easy to defend this guy as long as you have a bunker mentality and a tin-foil hat. So far, I’ve seen these techniques used:

1. Find something Wilson said that might actually be true and say “see, he didn’t lie.” I got a three page e-mail with a complete chronology of Wilson’s trip to Niger that tried to do that (see this incredible piece of work here.)

2. Find some disagreement over one of Wilson’s lies and say “see, some people think the gun was only hot and not smoking”. A reader does that in comments regarding the Plame memo of recommendation.

3. Change the subject to the outing of Valerie Plame, preferably with fist-pounding and red-faced outrage. This doesn’t work because the name of Wilson’s wife is all part of the story regarding his selection by the CIA and the stories he subsequently told.

4. Blame the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy on the Wilson outing. This is the approach taken by Salon, and it has the virtue of avoiding the subject of Wilson’s lack of credibility. Written by a former press aide to Wesley Clark, this attack is apparently part of a coordinated response.

The scorecard on the “Bush lied, people died” canard is beginning to tilt pretty strongly in favor of “no, he actually didn’t, but you did” as we know that Wilson, Michael Moore, Richard Clarke, and many other Democratic Party attack dogs aren’t credible.

Overcoming the media bias is going to be the prime issue in this year’s presidential election, so I’ll close with Newsweek editor Evan Thomas’ statement that we can’t afford to forget (h/t Blogs for Bush):

There’s one other base here, the media. Let’s talk a little media bias here. The media, I think, wants Kerry to win and I think they’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards I’m talking about the establishment media, not Fox. They’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and there’s going to be this glow about them, collective glow, the two of them, that’s going to be worth maybe 15 points.

It’s going to take a full-scale, Lott-sized effort to get the Wilson story the prominence it deserves.

Continue reading “The Invisible Man”

Apparently we all agree that the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain has a political bias; liberal ex-blogger John Kowalski accused them of pro-Bush bias and Stephen Hayes accuses them of anti-Bush bias.

Knight Ridder itself cops to the Hayes charge, which no doubt confirms the Kowalski theory:

By Wednesday, Knight Ridder had posted a correction. “President Bush’s comments about terrorism were incorrectly reported in that saying the president insisted there was an operational link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. The president suggested that such a link existed, but didn’t explicitly make that connection.”

It strikes me that it’s difficult to tar all the writers for all the Knight-Ridder papers with the same brush, so I won’t play. In the last election, their San Jose paper endorsed Gore, and their paper in the next country endorsed Bush, so do the math.