Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Bush Lies About Iranian Nukes
President Bush lied in his press conference just over a half an hour ago. He stated that he first learned that Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapons program just last week. However, the front page story on the Washington Post reports that he first learned of it months ago, most particularly, PRIOR to his incendiary remark about how if Iran got a nuclear weapon, this could lead to World War III.
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4 comments:
The real issue is has this administration been lying (that is saying something known to be false) or has it been deluding itself?
In the first case there is always the hope that since the underlying truth is known it may be used to make decisions at some point in the future
The second case is much more worrisome because new facts can't be expected to alter policies.
There is a third category aptly described by Harry Frankfurt in his book "On Bullshit". This is a person who has no use for the truth, everything is done to promote immediate objectives. A perfect example is Bill O'Reilly who will contradict himself to make a point, sometimes within the same sentence.
The extreme case of this type is, of course, the sociopath.
Those who think that policies can be made by a rational evaluation of the data don't understand their opponents and are continually amazed when facts have no influence on strongly held opinions.
Corporatively, the U.S. regime is a sociopath. Just the fact that the NIE has found that Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons doesn't rule out a pre-emptive military strike to stop them from what they're not doing. It may even make it more urgent to act before the intelligence "sinks in".
Why should a lack of adherence to the facts come as any surprise in regards to anything said by any member of the Bush administration?
Did not Karl Rove sit on the Charley Rose show the other day and say with a traight face that it was the Congress that led the charge to war in Iraq? Granted that Karl has been challenged on that absurd revision of realilty after the fact, but did not Mr. Rose sit there as though he were being educated to the truth about the issue? As we all seem to recognize, it is the media's reactive inaction to these total fabrications that provides the "verification" to the public at large of these falsifications.
We know and expect that the leadership of ouor political parties tell llies, big lies at that. They barely call each other out on these lies, and only the press could provide some reality check for the public. That doesn't happen much lately, and even when some journalist tries to do so in real time that alert is systematicly ignored by the rest.
I note the latest spin on whether or not Bush lied. It is now being pointed out that after August, when apparently Bush was told of the new findings, tentatively, by DNI Director, McConnell, he shifted his rhetoric slightly, worrying about Iranian "knowledge how to make a bomb" rather than the Iranians actually making one, although he certainly reverted to the latter in his Oct. 17 speech in which he raised the spectre of a possible WW III, if they got one.
As regards eliminating "knowledge of how to make a bomb," well, what does he want them to do? Hang all their physicists publicly?
Barkley
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