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Unfit To Serve
"You, Mr.. Bush, are a bald-faced liar."
8 Minute Video - Keith Olbermann
A Special Comment about the President’s cataclysmic deception about Iran.
MSNBC - Broadcast 12/06/07
Click on "comments" below to read or post comments
TRANSCRIPT
Finally, as promised, a Special Comment about the President's cataclysmic
deception about Iran.
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There are few choices more terrifying than the one Mr.. Bush has left us with
tonight.
We have either a president who is too dishonest to restrain himself from
invoking World War Three about Iran at least six weeks after he had to have
known that the analogy would be fantastic, irresponsible hyperbole -- or we have
a president too transcendently stupid not to have asked -- at what now appears
to have been a series of opportunities to do so -- whether the fairy tales he
either created or was fed, were still even remotely plausible.
A pathological presidential liar, or an idiot-in-chief. It is the nightmare
scenario of political science fiction: A critical juncture in our history and,
contained in either answer, a president manifestly unfit to serve, and behind
him in the vice presidency: an unapologetic war-monger who has long been seeing
a world visible only to himself.
After Ms Perino's announcement from the White House late last night, the
timeline is inescapable and clear.
In August the President was told by his hand-picked Major Domo of intelligence
Mike McConnell, a flinty, high-strung-looking, worrying-warrior who will always
see more clouds than silver linings, that what "everybody thought" about Iran
might be, in essence, crap.
Yet on October 17th the President said of Iran and its president Ahmadinejad:
"I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War Three, it
seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge
to make a nuclear weapon."
And as he said that, Mr.. Bush knew that at bare minimum there was a strong
chance that his rhetoric was nothing more than words with which to scare the
Iranians.
Or was it, Sir, to scare the Americans?
Does Iran not really fit into the equation here? Have you just scribbled it into
the fill-in-the-blank on the same template you used, to scare us about Iraq?
In August, any commander-in-chief still able-minded or uncorrupted or both, Sir,
would have invoked the quality the job most requires: mental flexibility.
A bright man, or an honest man, would have realized no later than the McConnell
briefing that the only true danger about Iran was the damage that could be done
by an unhinged, irrational Chicken Little of a president, shooting his mouth
off, backed up by only his own hysteria and his own delusions of omniscience.
Not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mr. Bush.
The Chicken Little of presidents is the one, Sir, that you see in the mirror.
And the mind reels at the thought of a Vice President fully briefed on the
revised Intel as long as two weeks ago -- briefed on the fact that Iran
abandoned its pursuit of this imminent threat four years ago -- who never
bothered to mention it to his boss.
It is nearly forgotten today, but throughout much of Ronald Reagan's presidency
it was widely believed that he was little more than a front-man for some
never-viewed, behind-the-scenes, string-puller.
Today, as evidenced by this latest remarkable, historic malfeasance, it is
inescapable, that Dick Cheney is either this president's evil ventriloquist, or
he thinks he is.
What servant of any of the 42 previous presidents could possibly withhold
information of this urgency and gravity, and wind up back at his desk the next
morning, instead of winding up before a Congressional investigation -- or a
criminal one?
Mr. Bush -- if you can still hear us -- if you did not previously agree to this
scenario in which Dick Cheney is the actual detective and you're Remington
Steele -- you must disenthrall yourself: Mr. Cheney has usurped your
constitutional powers, cut you out of the information loop, and led you down the
path to an unprecedented presidency in which the facts are optional, the Intel
is valued less than the hunch, and the assistant runs the store.
The problem is, Sir, your assistant is robbing you -- and your country -- blind.
Not merely in monetary terms, Mr.. Bush, but more importantly of the traditions
and righteousness for which we have stood, at great risk, for centuries:
Honesty, Law, Moral Force.
Mr.. Cheney has helped, Sir, to make your Administration into the kind our
ancestors saw in the 1860's and 1870's and 1880's -- the ones that abandoned
Reconstruction, and sent this country marching backwards into the pit of
American Apartheid.
Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland...
Presidents who will be remembered only in a blur of failure, Mr.. Bush.
Presidents who will be remembered only as functions of those who opposed them --
the opponents whom history proved right.
Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland... Bush.
Would that we could let this President off the hook by seeing him only as
marionette or moron.
But a study of the mutation of his language about Iran proves that though he may
not be very good at it, he is, himself, still a manipulative, Machiavellian,
snake-oil salesman.
The Bushian etymology was tracked by Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post's
website.
It is staggering.
March 31st: "Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon..."
June 5th: Iran's "pursuit of nuclear weapons..."
June 19th: "consequences to the Iranian government if they continue to pursue a
nuclear weapon..."
July 12th: "the same regime in Iran that is pursuing nuclear weapons..."
August 6th: "this is a government that has proclaimed its desire to build a
nuclear weapon..."
Notice a pattern?
Trying to develop, build or pursue a nuclear weapon.
Then, sometime between August 6th and August 9th, those terms are suddenly
swapped out, so subtly that only in retrospect can we see that somebody has
warned the President, not only that he has gone out too far on the limb of
terror -- but there may not even be a tree there...
McConnell, or someone, must have briefed him then.
August 9th: "They have expressed their desire to be able to enrich uranium,
which we believe is a step toward having a nuclear weapons program..."
August 28th: "Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear
weapons..."
October 4th: "you should not have the know-how on how to make a (nuclear)
weapon..."
October 17th: "until they suspend and/or make it clear that they, that their
statements aren't real, yeah, I believe they want to have the **capacity**, the
**knowledge**, in order to make a nuclear weapon."
Before August 9th, it's: Trying to develop, build or pursue a nuclear weapon.
After August 9th, it's: Desire, pursuit, want...knowledge technology know-how to
enrich uranium.
And we are to believe, Mr.. Bush, that the National Intelligence Estimate this
week talks of the Iranians suspending their nuclear weapons program in 2003...
And you talked of the Iranians suspending their nuclear weapons program on
October 17th...
And that's just a coincidence?
---
And we are to believe, Mr.. Bush, that nobody told you any of this until last
week?
Your insistence that you were not briefed on the NIE until last week might be
legally true -- something like "what the definition of is is -- but with the
subject matter being not interns but the threat of nuclear war.
Legally, it might save you from some war crimes trial... but ethically, it is a
lie.
It is indefensible.
You have been yelling threats into a phone for nearly four months, after the guy
on the other end had already hung up.
You, Mr.. Bush, are a bald-faced liar.
--
And more over, you have just revealed that John Bolton, and Norman Podhoretz,
and the Wall Street Journal Editorial board, are also bald-faced liars.
We are to believe that the Intel Community, or maybe the State Department,
cooked the raw intelligence about Iran, falsely diminished the Iranian nuclear
threat, to make you look bad?
And you proceeded to let them make you look bad?
---
You not only knew all of this about Iran, in early August...
But you also knew... it was... accurate.
And instead of sharing this good news with the people you have obviously
forgotten you represent...
You merely fine-tuned your terrorizing of those people, to legally cover your
own backside...
While you filled the factual gap with sadistic visions of -- as you phrased it
on August 28th: a quote "nuclear holocaust" -- and, as you phrased it on October
17th, quote: "World War Three."
---
My comments, Mr. Bush, are often dismissed as simple repetitions of the phrase
"George Bush has no business being president."
Well, guess what?
Tonight: hanged by your own words... convicted by your own deliberate lies...
You, sir, have no business... being president.
---
Good night, and good luck.
www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18847.htm
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