Beginning To See The Light

WASHINGTON — President Bush said Tuesday that he wanted to know who leaked a CIA employee's name to reporters, if in fact someone in his administration wrongly passed out the information.

“Leaks of classified information are bad things. We’ve got too much leaking in Washington,“ Bush said during a stop in Chicago. "I want to know who the leakers are.”

Leaks are bad things.  Bush wants to know who the leakers are!

According to a filing from the prosecutor in the Valerie Plame leak investigation, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, who has been indicted for lying in the case, told a grand jury that President Bush specifically authorized him to leak from an intelligence document on WMD in Iraq.

Bush finds out the leakers are him!  Then he decideds leaks are good things!

Bush said he had authorized the release of the documents because some Americans questioned his reasons for going to war.

"So I wanted people to see the truth," he said. "And I thought it made sense for people to see the truth."

Leaks help people see the truth.  And that's a good thing.  Except when it's a bad thing.  But in this case, it was a good thing because it helped the Murican people unnerstan' the truth.

WASHINGTON, April 8 — President Bush's apparent order authorizing a senior White House official to reveal to a reporter previously classified intelligence about Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain uranium came as the information was already being discredited by several other officials in the administration, interviews and documents from the time show…

Mr. Fitzgerald, in his filing, said that Mr. Libby had been authorized to tell Judith Miller, then a reporter for The New York Times, on July 8, 2003, that a key finding of the 2002 intelligence estimate on Iraq was that Baghdad had been vigorously seeking to acquire uranium from Africa.

But a week earlier, in an interview in his State Department office, Mr. Powell told three other reporters for The Times that intelligence agencies had essentially rejected that contention, and were "no longer carrying it as a credible item" by early 2003, when he was preparing to make the case against Iraq at the United Nations.

It's almost too easy, isn't it?

Maybe Chimpy was just donning one of the many hats and costumes he wears as Disaster In Chief--that of Irony Monkey!  By leaking parts of discredited documents, then pretending he had no knowledge of it whatsoever, he helped the American people see the truth of what an unbelievable, incompetent liar he is.

I think it's pretty obvious.  But the American people don't want to believe that they have the most dishonest man who ever lived in their White House.  But Bush wants to help 'em unnerstan':

"I know you're thinking about, well, when's he going to get our troops out of there," Mr. Bush said, before going on to say that such a decision would be based not on polls but on "the recommendations of our generals on the ground."

Bush set aside them politics that history alearned him lost us the Viet Nam war!  So he listens to his genrils.

General Newbold served as director of operations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2000 through the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the war in Afghanistan. He left military service in late 2002, as the Defense Department was deep into planning for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"I retired from the military four months before the invasion, in part because of my opposition to those who had used 9/11's tragedy to hijack our security policy," General Newbold wrote…

The "consequence of the military's quiescence" in the current environment, he wrote, "was that a fundamentally flawed plan was executed for an invented war, while pursuing the real enemy, Al Qaeda, became a secondary effort."

General Newbold's essay follows one on March 19, by another retired officer, Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, who commanded the training of Iraqi security forces in the year after Baghdad fell. General Eaton wrote an Op-Ed article in The New York Times criticizing Mr. Rumsfeld's management of the war, adding, "President Bush should accept the offer to resign that Mr. Rumsfeld says he has tendered more than once."

When asked about that essay, President Bush rejected the call to dismiss Mr. Rumsfeld, repeating as he often has that he was satisfied with Mr. Rumsfeld's performance…

Well, maybe not all his genrils. 

Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz criticized the Army's chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, after Shinseki told Congress in February that the occupation could require "several hundred thousand troops." Wolfowitz called Shinseki's estimate "wildly off the mark."

Though, to be fair, the Bushies do say to Marine Corps Lieutenant General Gregory Newbold, Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni, and former Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki that it's their fault for not expressing their concerns.  Bush can't be held accountable for shit nobody tells him!

A senior Pentagon official on Mr. Rumsfeld's staff said Sunday that the Pentagon leadership provided ample opportunity for senior officers to voice concerns.

"It is hard for the secretary and the rest of the policy leadership to understand the situation if they are not getting good, unvarnished advice from military commanders," the civilian official said.

All them genrils have been avarnishin' the Truth, which Bush wants the People to unnerstan'.

Paul Bremer, the ranking U.S. official in Iraq for a year after the 2003 invasion, said he pushed the Pentagon to increase the number of troops there but was ignored despite growing lawlessness and an increasingly lethal insurgency.

Bremer said he gave a think tank report to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in May 2003 suggesting stabilizing Iraq would require 500,000 troops — more than three times the U.S. forces then in Iraq.

"I never heard back from him about the report," Bremer wrote in his memoir, My Year in Iraq, released Monday.

Wait!  There's more varnishing!

Former Army secretary Thomas White said in an interview that senior Defense officials "are unwilling to come to grips" with the scale of the postwar U.S. obligation in Iraq…

The interview was White's first since leaving the Pentagon in May after a series of public feuds with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld led to his firing…

Rumsfeld was furious with White when the Army secretary agreed with Shinseki.

It must be frustrating for Bush.  He's doing just about everything he can to help the People unnerstan' that he's a great big ol' bullshitter and, yet, twenty percent of us still think he's doing a good job!

Today, just 20 percent of Americans "strongly" approve of his work in office, while more than twice as many, 47 percent, strongly disapprove. At the start of Bush's second term, he had the same number of strong supporters and strong opponents.

Christ, what does he have to do to convince you idiots that he can't be trusted???  About anything?  Spell it out for you?  Fine!  He read My Pet Goat.  He can spell.  Here he goes:

I took this office to make a difference, not to mark time. I came to this office to confront problems directly and forcefully, not to pass them on to future Presidents or future generations.

The one thing he won't do as Preznit is pass problems onto future Presidents!

Later in the news conference, Bush was asked whether there would come a day when no U.S. forces are in Iraq.

“That, of course, is an objective. And that will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq,” he said.

Come on, Twenty Percenters.  You can do it.  Your Preznit wants you to do it.  He wants you to see the truth:

He is an idiot.

Comments

[amutepiggy]

dear GOD. he makes me want to quit breathing.

you know, i caught Charlie Rose last night. they had a 4-person panel discussing our current "situation"- which is my codeword for THE HORRENDOUS FUCKUP THAT IS EVERY SINGLE THING THIS ADMINISTRATION IS DOING. they all forcefully described the Bush strategy as "tough and dumb."

that was at least kind of refreshing.

too bad Bush is going to get us all killed.

[Thaddeus Hoffmeister]

Shinseki bucked the trend of 'yes-men' and offered his own candid assessment of what was needed in Iraq. His prophetic predictions about Iraq were unfortunately ignored and now haunt those responsible for planning and executing the war.

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