Rockefeller to Wolf: Bush Admin stovepiped the intelligence.

[kpete]

On Wolf Blitzer's show, Wolf showed Senator Jay Rockefeller's (D-WV) floor speech explaining his Aye vote for authorizing force against Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Rockefeller did the right thing and the smart thing - He admitted he was completely wrong in voting for the Iraq War. He said that if he knew then what he knows now, he would never ever would have voted for war in Iraq. He insisted that the reason he did not know then what he knows now was because the Bush Administration stovepiped the intelligence. In effect, he called them liars.


http://www.dailykos.com/

[Lex]

1. No full disclosure to the Congress, pre-war.

All the Dems should be screaming loudly about this.

[leftchick]

3. yeah well hil, biden, schumer and lieberman are all singing the same

repuke tune.. "We did the right thing by going into Iraq and we need more troops" :puke:

[Lex]

4. Idiots!

n/t

[indepat]

8. We're f*cked as a nation by Dems singing this tune

[MissWaverly]

2. Thank you, I used the same argument to defend Kerry

They were bashing Kerry on ABC This Week for voting for the war, Kerry did not present the argument for the war, if the argument for
war was deeply flawed; it was not Kerry's fault. I quite frankly
am tired of this shell game. Harry Truman had a sign on his desk
saying "The buck stops here." George Bush is president, he was president for 3 years before we declared war on Iraq. The argument
for war was presented by members of his administration, it was not
Clinton's fault, it was not Kerry's fault and it certainly was not the fault of the American people. The buck stops at the desk of the
President of the United States, the Commander in Chief.

[mike_c]

5. then he wasn't paying attention....

The U.S. has known that Iraq was disarmed since the early nineties. Everything else was baldfaced propaganda, including during the Clinton presidency. Any credible mea culpa for the IWR vote must include either "it was an issue I didn't know much about, so I just did what the president wanted," or "everybody knew Iraq was not a threat-- but we thought the administration was providing sufficient political cover, and we thought it would be over before anyone began asking hard questions."

I just can't accept an "apology" that attempts to shift the responsibility behind the scenes-- "I'm sorry I did it, but I only did it because Bush lied." That's not accepting responsibility-- that's just another tried and true Washington CYA technique.

[Lex]

6. The Dems should seize the political opportunity

to demonstrate that the White House lied about the pre-War intel.

When they have a softball lobbed at them like this, they should hit it out of the park.

[ThomWV]

10. Well, Put It To Scale Then

On a list of possible answers the worst one would be 'I voted for the war and I still think it was right." Jay didn't say that.

The second worst answer would be I voted for the war and it was because the intelligence agencies were not able to deliver accurate information to the President and as a consequence on to myself. So I did the wrong thing but it was not my fault or the President's fault.' Jay didn't say that.

As a third option he might have said any number of things but what we have now is an accurate assessment of the deception passed as fact by the Administration by one of the persons who received not only the most available information outside of the Administration but also who received it soonest. If Bush was ling what Democrats was lied to more than the Democratic Members of the Intelligence Committee?

[liveoaktx]

7. Video

Rockefeller's Floor speech

[creeksneakers2]

9. I think Democrats could have been fooled in the beginning

Almost anybody could have. But, before the war, almost every piece of intelligence cited by the Bush cabal was discovered to be fraudulent. At that time, somebody could have stood up and called for a review of all the WMD intelligence. I don't remember anybody doing that.

People in the press and the Democratic party didn't stand up because they would have been destroyed by the RW for doing it. Fear of the RW gave them almost total control of the media, and they used that control to become even more of a threat to anybody who spoke up.

Right now, the RW is still up to its same tricks. The only defense they have is to point fingers at Democrats who went along with the WMD hoax, hoping that those Democrats will be frightened into silence once again.

The RW has a shrewd game going. They can get away with doing something that will hurt the country. They can do it right in front of everybody. Those who oppose get destroyed. Those who go along take the blame when the harm comes.

For now, I'll accept those in the press who lie if the lie gets us back in the right direction. The press pretends they were just supporting the president out of patriotism because of 9/11. The Democrats say they were fooled.

The important thing is, people have to lose their fear of the right wing. None of this could have happened if people weren't afraid of them.