Desperately seeking no uranium from Africa

I'm on the verge of concluding, reluctantly, that one of my favorite writers, Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby, has gone over to the Dark Side.

At least on the issue of Joe Wilson, he's pretty much going along with silly Republican comma-dancing.

Somerby for years concentrated on analyzing the mainstream media and celebrity pundits, how their pursuit of celebrity more and more led them to be careless with facts.  His exhibit #1 and his favorite hobby-horse was what he calls the "War Against Gore," the open hostility to Al Gore expressed by the mainstream media.

After last year's national election, he switched his focus more toward looking at how liberal bloggers and liberal journalists writing in an overtly partisan way were dealing with the mainstream media's dysfunctional habits.  Lately he's come to focus more and more on complaining about partisan Democratic bloggers drawing conclusions about unfolding news stories.

And now he's attacking Democrats for seeing the PlameGate/CheneyGate scandal as an important political event!  In his 10/26/05 post, he writes:

We think the liberal cheerleading for prosecution is unbelievably childish and unwise - a childish portent of future disaster for liberal and progressive interests.

Is he kidding?  Does he actually think that Democrats who have been objecting all along to the kinds of conduct being investigated are going to be dismayed that the legal system is working the way it's supposed to work?

On this story, it looks more and more like he's carrying water for tortured Republican efforts to discredit Joe Wilson and his credibility.  I've written in the last few days (10/22/05 and 10/26/05) about his arguments around whether Joe Wilson July 2003 op-ed actually challenged Bush's claims in the 2003 State of the Union address.  In his 10/27/05 post, he writes:

In his speech [the 2003 SOTU], Bush said Iraq sought uranium. Wilson’s column didn’t contradict that. But back in July 2003, liberals were eager for a simple narrative - and we [liberals] were too dumb and too hapless to create a strong story. So we pretended we didn’t notice the logical problems with Wilson’s colorful narrative. And today, more than two years later, Josh [Marshall] still pretends that folk are being “con men” when they mention the world’s simplest facts.

I'm not going to repeat here what I said in my two earlier posts to which I linked above.  Here, I'll just leave it at saying that the best one can say about Somerby's position is that it's a downright eccentric take on Bush's notorious "16 words."  Nobody hearing that speech, least of all Republican war fans, would have assumed he was simply stating a matter-of-fact observation that Britain had made a report.  He was trying hard to convince the Congress and the public that Saddam Hussein was very close to developing a nuclear weapon, which he was very likely to give to terrorists to use against the United States.

Somerby is still repeating the spin that Clifford May of the conservative National Review Online began using very soon after Wilson's op-ed appeared:  Scandal! Bush’s enemies aren't telling the truth about what he said 07/11/03.  (Wilson's famous New York Times op-ed appeared late in the evening of 07/05/03.)

The president's critics are lying. Mr. Bush never claimed that Saddam Hussein had purchased uranium from Niger. It is not true - as USA Today reported on page one Friday morning — that "tainted evidence made it into the President's State of the Union address." For the record, here's what President Bush actually said in his SOTU: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
    
Precisely which part of that statement isn't true? The British government did say that it believed Saddam had sought African uranium. Is it possible that the British government was mistaken? Sure. Is it possible that Her Majesty's government came by that belief based on an erroneous American intelligence report about a transaction between Iraq and Niger? Yes - but British Prime Minister Tony Blair and members of his Cabinet say that's not what happened.

Josh Marshall calls this the "con-man defense", and the label fits, even though the Howler doesn't like it.  Because the argument is essentially this:  Hey, Bush wasn't saying he believed that Iraq was trying to get uranium.  He was  just trying to trick suckers like you into thinking that he was saying that.  So if you did, you just got snookered.  Don't blame Bush because you let yourself be conned by him.  You should have known he was scamming you!

Why a guy with Bob Somerby's obviously strong analytical skills decided to lock onto a daffy argument like that is beyond me.