Josh Marshall says Condi's performance on Wolf "pathetic"

[diplomats]

I was most curious this morning to see Wolf Blitzer's interview with Condi Rice since she is the point at which all the arrows are now pointing, even it's taken the press a few days to pick up on that fact. Frankly, it wasn't pretty -- certainly not on the level of substance, but not even on the level of presentation. All of the commentators this morning were coming around to the realization that the real question is less whether Tenet's CIA didn't push hard enough to keep bogus information out of the president's speech as why others were pushing so hard to keep it in.
And the 'others' -- at least in an immediate sense -- were staffers in Rice's NSC.
Rice's efforts to work her way out of this tight knot of logic -- especially the new revelation that George Tenet personally told her deputy, Stephen Hadley, to keep the uranium canard out of a speech in October -- were, to put it mildly, pathetic. The fact that the CIA Director had to intervene personally with the Deputy National Security Advisor to get the bogus information out of an earlier speech raises the obvious question: just how many times did the Agency have to warn the White House off the bogus uranium claim before they got the message and stopped trying to put it into the president's mouth?
Rice's efforts to answer these questions fell back on the same shambling claims that new information was becoming available between one incident and the next (if anything the opposite was true) or the endless repetition of her talking points that "it is sixteen words and it has become an enormously overblown issue." Here presentation was incoherent, contradictory and filled with several more extremely misleading statements.
One in particular jumped out at me. I don't have the transcript of her remarks yet. But she said, essentially, that Joseph Wilson's report was comprised of official denials from Nigerien government officials and the suggestion that a private businessman acting as an intermediary for the Iraqis had made an overture to one of those officials about possible uranium sales.
more ...

http://talkingpointsmemo.com

[roguevalley]

1. May I say it?

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!

[nostamj]

2. Condi isn't even a GOOD liar...

WHAT is she doing in this administration?

she should have been dumped for her post-9/11 lies. they permanently tainted her as any kind of viable spokesperson. (not to mention that she bore personal responsibility for intelligence failings that allowed the attacks to happen)

couldn't BushCo find, at least, a better LIAR?

can they survive without the masterful deceit of FLIEsher?

[wellstone_democrat]

3. I know, Josh knows, but...

my neighbor doesn't. He's a physician and doesn't have time for more than occaisional CNN and a quick NYT glance along with his daily NPR snippets.

The point is, and I wrote at length about this elsewhere, the administration only needed to put up a united defense that was ADEQUATE. One that relied on the pre-digestion of:
Bush is honest
Saddam was a bad man who had to go to liberate his people

and so forth.

Those of us who followed this day in and out knew the equivocations, the ellisions of data, the fudging, the hemming and hawing and the outright falsehoods. Most watching today did not. Not my bright, involved physician neighbor. Not the focus group of 20 I ran this morning through these shows. The WH is "dinged" (as one said) and the level of skepticism is up a bit, but when the idea is floated that all politicians lie/exagerate and that this one was either a mistake or an *exaggeration* in service of freeing the oppressed. it got across the board support. If anything is damaging them at the moment with this highly desirable demographic I've been tracking since spring 2001, it is the human cost (American) of occupation in Iraq.

What people keep talking about is "reading" as details and parsing to the general public. The Sunday shows could have pushed this harder and made it stick better but they didn't. If they don't soon, it won't have legs, it will have been "knee-capped."

[diplomats]

5. I hope this is just getting started

this things take time to build. I consider it a good sign that the level of skepticism has increased, even if it's by a small amount.

[wellstone_democrat]

10. definitely, I agree

and see fissures in the support that looks like people coming out of hypnosis. I just don't want to see hearts broken when this is not the killing blow or even the event that creates a true and enduring crisis.

But, it does indeed matter. Even if "a datapoint" OR "sixteen little words" can be believed at the moment, there is damage done. And, those of us who have followed this crew of pirates closely know that there is plenty more scandal where this came from. If not this, then something else.

[DrBB]

16. Ah, but here's the problem with "My neighbor never heard of it"

This story has NOT been driven by public opinion, quite the opposite. It has been pushed by journalists and pols who are genuinely on to something, and because the terms of the scandal are so unequivocal--it's nice and simple: the story was bogus, it was known to BE bogus nearly a year before the SOTUS, and so Why Was It In the SOTUS?--it has been easier to hang onto, long enough that it IS slowly penetrating the consciousness of the less attuned.

For indeed, the approvals ARE dropping rather precipitiously, thanks to the lack of WMD and the ongoing attacks and death toll that draw the whole "Liberators" narrative into question.

This story is acting as the spearhead for that process--it's rapidly becoming the focal point for all of the misgivings about the war and the arrogance of this admin.

That's why your neighbor's attitude doesn't matter. He doesn't get it yet. Fine. Niether did most of the country at the analogous stage in the Watergate story. What matters is, Will your neighbor's lack of interest stop it from developing? And the answer, I am quite confident, is no.

So when it starts to stink like a car-struck skunk that has dragged itself into your neighbor's crawlspace to die and has had enough time to ripen and swell and burst under there.... he'll notice. When the time comes, he'll notice.

[wellstone_democrat]

18. I agree in theory

but, he will only get it if it is pursued by journalists in the traditional press---sure, driven by blogs and other sources one would hope, but Watergate broke due to persistant press investigation. What I am saying is that saying it is the "end" as many on this forum have been is premature. This definitely has dented that armor of invicibility and "integrity" that is the narrative about Bush* from the WH and every media source but...unless and until it is in the narrative of my neighbor and those like him up and down the socio-economic ladder, then it will have the proverbial "legs."

Right now, Josh Marshall, DUers and others who closely follow political news can and should be optimistic that if this doesn't disrupt that victorious "liberation" narrative and unravel 100s of other falsehoods then it is perhaps the first serious breach of the wall. And, that eventually something will take that wall down. But, like Watergate, that vast middle of the electorate has to be aware and enraged. I hope that this skunk does begin to stink, but it right now its just a bit aromatic and easy to ignore if you shut the window....

[caledesi]

4. Thank you. Good stuff in the article.

[JackSwift]

6. It's not merely 16 words, its hundreds of lies and cover-ups

Unfortunately, the press is too stupid to follow details and complexity, and they have seized on this one example of Junta mendacity. There were hundreds of these kinds of lies on all sorts of issues.

[gratuitous]

11. What is this "16 words" nonsense?

I mean, if a witness in a murder trial was grilled by the defense for three days straight, the amount of verbiage wouldn't matter one whit to the jury that heard the witness say, "I saw the defendant kill the victim." The defense attorney who tried to say that that assertion was only seven words out of three days' worth of testimony would be rightfully laughed out of the courtroom.

Condi should be laughed off the air with that stupid assertion hanging in the air. Wotta maroon!

[Walt Starr]

12. Clinton was impeached over 11 words.

"I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky."

Somebody should throw that in the reichwing talking heads faces when they pull out the 16 words canard.

[DiverDave]

7. Just begs the REAL question,

How many OTHER LIES AND "slipups"??

I think this is just 1 of HUNDREDS.

Dave

[dfong63]

8. now that you mention it, condi

... those "sixteen words" are just one case. they are one of the few cases where verifiable evidence was promulgated to back up your claims. and the fact that the evidence was fraudulent, certainly casts doubt on the other cases where no verifiable evidence was presented, doesn't it?

those sixteen words are the tip of the iceberg.

[comradebillyboy]

9. zig brezensky appeared on the show after condi

and he cut through the crap and said the intel was bad because, if we know so much about the wmd, how did we not notice their disappearance. he said there was no nuclear program and no wmd either.

i like the emperor's new clothes

[JustJoe]

13. A Condi quote from MTP:

"It would have been quite odd
for us to put something in the President's speech
that we knew was faulty."

[Friar]

14. my question is still

Why was this document created in the first place? What purpose did it server?

[JustJoe]

15. nothing here, go home

Sorry--misunderstood the question.
Need a msg delete button.

[DrBB]

17. Sy Hersh's question too, way back

...in February or whenever it was that he did the New Yorker piece. God I coulda sworn that was last year, but I'm getting old and fuzzy on timelines.

But that was his question: where'd it come from? "Italy" is what we're being told now. The Italian secret services. But who fed it to them and why?

Well there are lots of little operators out there who are always trying to game the intelligence services for a few bucks. Cobble a story together out of public info, news reports, whatever, then pass it off as inside info. Or just make something up based on what you know somebody wants to hear, fake a document and hope they don't question it too closely cuz it's what they're looking for.

But maybe there's more to it than that. It might tell us an awful lot. But I suspect we'll never know.

[Sick of Bullshit]

19. Condi Rice-- Former director with Chevron

even had an oil tanker named after her:

http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2001/01june/june01names.html

One of the first oil companies to win a contract in the "newly liberated" Iraq was Chevron-Texaco:

http://www.khilafah.com/home/category.php?DocumentID=7495&TagID=2

As Gomer Pyle would say, "Surprise, surprise!"