As a joke, it's almost funny.

As a serious discussion it's a bunch of unfounded, truth ignoring nonsense.

The real funny thing is that people spreading around stuff like this is what lead to the false impressions the webpage is based on. The spread of the webpage is actually mimicing its own foundation. There's something interesting in that.

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*lol*

What's the truth?

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that our elected leaders have our best interests at heard, and we should place out faith, love, and support in their hands.

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And believing anything else is thoughtcrime.

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doubleplusgood

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As a joke, that was almost funny.

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Rest assured. It's a joke.

No-one will see it as anything but. Unless they want to, of course, for some weird rhetorical purpose.

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This is the American public we're talking about.

A page like this will be reference for at least some people when considering their votes for the next president.

There's an especially annoying segment of the population composed of mindless, slashdotting computer geeks who will eat this stuff up.

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The only false impressions or truth ignoring nonsense in the article is the Bush administration's actual statements that it's based on. I've been following the news fairly closely from a wide range of sources, and the page is pretty unassailable. The only questionable bit is 1.3.1 where the Administration admits calling Iraq an "imminent" threat. Last I heard, they're still denying that Bush's spokesman speaks for the Bush administration or pretending that the "imminent" claims about Iraq's threat to the US don't count because they also made an "imminent" claim about Iraq's threat to Turkey.

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Last I heard, they're still denying that Bush's spokesman speaks for the Bush administration or pretending that the "imminent" claims about Iraq's threat to the US don't count because they also made an "imminent" claim about Iraq's threat to Turkey.

God forbid you hire a spokesman to *speak* for you. That's fucking insane. And didn't Turkey balk at letting us stage from their territory? That doesn't exactly support "imminent" either.

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What quote, for example.

The other day Meet the Press (I believe it was) was trying their best to bash Chaney on this very topic, throwing "imminent" quotes in his face with an attitude of "Aha! We've got him now!" The only problem was that the quotes they presented didn't actually call Iraq an imminent threat.

If these quotes were the best they could do, and lord knows they looked, then this claim is absolutely unfounded. In my own following of the news I never heard the administration make that claim either, though I heard the popular press make it all the time.

In fact, what I heard out of the administration seemed to go out of its way (slightly) to say that Iraq was NOT an imminent threat, just a serious one.

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In fact, what I heard out of the administration seemed to go out of its way (slightly) to say that Iraq was NOT an imminent threat, just a serious one

How about this?

But no terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

-- Testimony as Delivered by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, D.C., September 18, 2002.

Mmm, backpedalling.

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Precisely.

"More immediate" does not mean immediate, and no this is not quibbling.

With all of these charges being paraded around, with people putting so much emphasis on them, and with people making such spiels as this around them, surely they can come up with a single example of the administration saying "Iraq is an immediate threat."

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Fine, a single example:

And the only point I want to make is that as long as Saddam is there, with everything we know about Saddam, as long as he possesses the weapons that we know he possesses, there is a threat, and I believe it's imminent because he could choose at any time to take an action we all very much hope he won't take. - Richard Perle, head of Bush's appointed defense policy board

There are plenty more.

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Yeah, I had tried the Iraq on the Record site before, and words like "immediate" didn't turn up much other than the tired Rumsfeild "more immediate" quote. I look again and there still aren't "plenty more".

The quote above is much better, which calls into question why the media is wasting time with these weaker ones. Of course I notice in the same transcript the line "[Powell] didn't make, and didn't even try to make, a case for the imminence of the threat."

It's all part of the biggest problem with this whole so highly stressed accusation: the rarity of examples. There really aren't "plenty" of examples of the administration saying that the threat was imminent or immediate, and there are even fewer strong examples. If this was some huge ongoing policy of evil deception and false claims, as the accusation really tries to communicate, there certainly would have been more than one or two examples of officials making the claims.

It just doesn't exist. All we see are three or four unimportant examples against plenty of times where such a trend WOULD have been evident, had it existed.

And no, "there is no more immediate threat than this" does not mean "there are several immediate threats, of which this is most immediate;" it means "there is no more immediate threat." Reading anything else into that sentence is intellectual dishonesty.

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and btw, "there is no more immediate threat than this" means "there are several immediate threats, of which this is the most immediate".

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Now be fair -- "there is no more immediate threat than this" can mean any number of things. It can also be a deceptive and misleading way of saying "there are no threats" or "of all threats, none are immediate." That's the beauty of political language.

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