Dishonest and Reprehensible

Fair Reader, I implore you, just skip this one. It’s quite dry. Stop back later to read the forthcoming robotic cat post.

Earlier today Your Montag wondered “aloud”: [Correcting for grammar and clarity] What are certain specific Democrats who voted in favor of authorizing force against Saddam Hussein actually saying nowadays? Is this just a generalized attack from the White House against specific allegations? Or is this in response to the calls for an investigation into the pre-war handling of intelligence?

Rather than do an extensive and expensive and time-consuming Nexis search Your Montag just quickly perused the following materials to get an idea of what kind of rhetoric is out there and to try and get an idea about what the White House Bunch have their panties in such a bunch over. My conclusion? Seems like a little of both.

Jay Rockefeller

“The American people still want to know – now more than ever – why the United States went to war, whether they were misled, and whether our intelligence was misused.

Rockefeller.senate.gov: SENATOR ROCKEFELLER STATEMENT ON THE CLOSED SESSION OF THE SENATE TO DISCUSS MATTERS RELATED TO THE MISUSE OF INTELLIGENCE

Carl Levin

Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) said today that newly declassified information indicates the Bush Administration’s use of pre-war intelligence was misleading.

Senator Carl Levin: News Release: Levin Says Newly Declassified Information Indicates Bush Administration’s Use of Pre-War Intelligence Was Misleading

Harry Reid

While the American people have seen continued evidence that they were misled about the war in Iraq and that intelligence information was manipulated, the Congress has still not gotten to the bottom of what happened and why. Be it the discredited allegations that Iraq was seeking nuclear material from Africa or recent revelations that the administration used an unreliable source for claims about Iraq’s connections with al-Qaeda, the American people deserve to know the full story about how the nation made the most serious decision a country can make – to go to war.

Reid.senate.gov: Democrats Seek Answers About the War in Iraq

[Page 2: What about Hillary and Nancy? And: a pithy quote from the ever pithy —if by “pithy” you mean concise in a dry, monotonous, life-sucking way; and if it’s even possible to cull something “pithy” from a speech whose summary runs 2573 words— John Kerry…]

Nancy Pelosi and Hillary seem to be calling for the President to lay out a concrete plan for moving forward in Iraq and to eventually withdraw the troops. In this admittedly limited search Your Montag didn’t find either one of them asserting that intelligence was misused in the run-up to the war; nor do they seem to be calling for an investigation into such charges as the other’s have. I may have missed something, but it seems like these two are content to say, “Let’s not worry about how we got here. Let’s just concentrate on how to get out of this mess.”

Interestingly Hillary’s name comes up a lot in the study of this PR campaign. She is featured in the RNC video; and is quoted in, as far as I can tell, every column defending the administration’s conduct with regard to the pre-war intelligence. She is practically in the same boat with these guys on being “wrong” about the intelligence and now preferring to let dead horses lie. If ‘they’ go down, they will try to drag her along with them.

And finally, of course there was John Kerry doing exactly the thing that Cheney et al are on about:

…they could have demanded and relied on accurate instead of manipulated intelligence, they chose not to.

And so could have you.

And:

We don’t know yet whether this [revealing Valerie Wilson’s occupation] will prove to be an indictable offense in a court of law, but for it, and for misleading a nation into war, they will be indicted in the high court of history.

Pithy! well… sort of.

And:

This administration made the wrong choice to cut and run from sound intelligence…

Only because you were asleep in the passenger seat.

In Kerry’s defense he also said this:

There is, as Robert Kennedy once said, ‘enough blame to go around,’ and I accept my share of the responsibility. But the mistakes of the past, no matter who made them, are no justification for marching ahead into a future of miscalculations and misjudgments and the loss of American lives with no end in sight. We each have a responsibility, to our country and our conscience, to be honest about where we should go from here. —JohnKerry.com: Kerry speaks from his heart and conscience on Iraq

There’s that word again!