Flaking for the unflakable

Or should that be shilling for the unshillable?

Either way, it's a bad sign for Bush that when the media whores trying to help out the White House can't find much better to say than this: Looking for a Way Out by Jonathan Alter Newsweek (accessed 11/20/05).

First, let's blow the whistle on the recent face-masking at the line of scrimmage. President Bush did not lie about why he took the country to war. Like President Clinton, he genuinely believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction; after all, American troops found much more WMD in Iraq in 1991 than prewar intelligence reports had indicated. So it was logical to think the same thing would happen again. At the same time, suggesting that intelligence was cooked to create a souffle of misleading certainty is hardly "one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city," as Cheney said last week. We have proof now that policymakers did indeed cherry-pick the evidence. Contrary to the wind coming out of GOP's elephant echo chamber, no congressional committee reports debunked the cherry-picking, and it is simply false that Democrats had access to the same intelligence as the president. Most senators inexcusably read only the executive summary of the prewar intelligence estimate, but it was hardly as extensive as what Bush saw.

In other words, Bush isn't a liar about the nonexistent Iraqi WMDs.  He's just a president that recklessly and irresponsibly took the country to war based on flaky, falsified intelligence.

That's quite a defence of Dear Leader there, Jonathan.

Also, I would say that the Alter column is one of the dopier pieces I've read on the Iraq War.  He concludes on this note:

The stakes in Iraq are higher than in Southeast Asia 40 years ago. Failure would give Al Qaeda a huge base from which to kill us. But for now it looks as if we'll keep sinking in the quicksand, with no consensus, no substantive debate and no end to the finger-pointing. It's almost enough to make you nostalgic for Vietnam.

Alter's attitude seems to be: Well, it's a little bit of this, a little bit of that, but who cares?  It's just a war. My only job is to sound like a Big Pundit who sticks faithfully to the consensus media scripts.