The Rocky Mountain News, July 12,2003
Headline: Bush blames CIA (see story pg 27A)
27A. Because if you’re just page turning, then before you read about the lie that sent a country to war, you should probably know… Page 4A Headline: Activist meditates on plan to reduce stress in the city.
Dig out 27A, ignore ½ page, full color photo of the President shaking hands with a young girl in Uganda, and resist temptation to first read Headline on same page: Charting ancient Greek gods truly a Herculean task.
Headline: Tenet takes blame. Yes, it was obviously Tenet’s fault. “The Democrat is the lone holdover from the Clinton administration.” By the way, don’t get too comfortable because about 6 paragraphs later, you’ll have to flip to page 29A to finish the story.
Question: Why must I dig to back pages of a newspaper to read an article about the biggest Presidential scandal since Watergate? No, wait. Screw Watergate. We didn’t go to war over Watergate. Fact: Statements of questionable factual basis should not be included in the President’s State of the Union Address. Given. Bad boy, Tenet. But please tell me there was more conversation than that before giving 250,000 soldiers permission to kill people. Tell me we didn’t go to war because Tenet said it was okay. Can I be honest for a second? I don’t give a crap what the President did or did not say in some speech, and I care even less whose fault it is that he said it. The meat of the issue is this: the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the National Security Advisor, and everyone else who was ever in the same room when the topic of war was discussed, … did anybody ever say, “Do we have proof?”
Y’all know what “proof” is, right? Concrete evidence… beyond a reasonable doubt… air-tight, death-penalty conviction kind of evidence. Are you hearing this?
CIA: We heard a rumor.
President: I’m gonna kick their ass.
Reasonable Person: Wait. Where’d you hear that? Is it true?
*audible pause… cue chirping crickets*
President: I’m gonna kick their ass.
Conclusion: a) There are no reasonable people in this administration.
b) There are reasonable people who did ask questions that the administration knew they couldn’t answer, and they declared war anyway.
c) None of the above. This is all a bad dream. Everything will return to normal as soon as we come down off this bad acid trip.
Frightening.
