Stritly Speaking II This Time It's Personal___

First I would like to thank Michael Froomkin for the link to my post begging Kevin Drum not to write "begs the question" so often.

Second I would like to hone in on his childhood hounehold noting that his little brother wrote this

"To the contrary, I see the press honing in on the lack of solid intelligence suggesting that Iraq had nuclear weapons and might give them to al Qaeda."

Now the press might be honing or sharpening their knives (or quills or keyboards) but they are not honing in. They are homing in.

The one or two regular readers of this blog will be amused at my enthusiasm for copy editing others given my casual grammer and roughly random spelling.

To be a bit less twitty, the sentence has another problem. The Bush administration never suggested that Iraq had nuclear weapons. If one wants to invade a country, it is very unwise to convince people that it has nuclear weapons. They tried to convince the congress, the public and the security council that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program which could be nipped in the bud by an invasion when, in fact, it had already been blasted on the vine by desert storm (unforgivable mixed metaphor as I am looking out on a vineyard and know perfectly well that it goes bud, flower, grape so a bud is a much less advanced stage than the young grape which can be blasted on the vine).

The post in general is excellent (partly because the Post did a great job recently). Froomkin notes that Bush's speach on Iraq was basicallly a mass of lies and distortions too vague to amount to actual lies. His reply to www.whitehouse.gov's reply to Milbank in Pincus in the post is particularly excellent. I especially liked

And the White House again insisted that "congressional and independent committees have repeatedly reported no distortion of intelligence." While that's strictly true, it doesn't in any way refute Milbank and Pincus's point, which is that none of these investigations were authorized to even pursue that question.

heh indeed, strictly true and deliberately misleading. Notice that the sentence could have been written "congressional and independent committees have not reported distortion of intelligence" but that would not sound as much like "congressional and independent committees have repeatedly reported [that there was] no distortion of intelligence." Www.whitehouse.gov's argument begs the question, and in particular it begs me to ask "why didn't you add that "congressional and independent committees have repeatedly reported no martian kidnapping of Elvis ?" which would be equally true and equally a response to Milbank and Pincus's point.




Very late update due to critically split sides: Actually the very best part of Dan Froomkin's post was the very end which is this link.