Give me novocaine

By Creature

I should be numb to the lies by now, but I am not. George Bush would have you believe that his "justifiable declassification" and subsequent "briefing" of the media was a matter of "national security" because a critic was spreading "misinformation" about the "truth" he was using as justification for going to war.

What George Bush meant to say was that his "leaking" of classified material to a few "select reporters" was a matter of "covering his ass" because a patriot was "exposing the lies" that he was using as justification for going to war.

Here is Bush's first public statement on the whole sordid matter:

"I wanted people to see the truth and thought it made sense for people to see the truth," Bush said during an appearance at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.

"You're not supposed to talk about classified information, and so I declassified the document," he said in a question-and-answer session after delivering a speech on Iraq. "I thought it was important for people to get a better sense for why I was saying what I was saying in my speeches. And I felt I could do so without jeopardizing ongoing intelligence matters, and so I did."

The insincerity just oozes out, doesn't it?

It's also the right-wing justification of all this insincerity that really has me going today. They continue to insists that Saddam was looking to procure uranium from Niger. Hitchens does it here, and the Leeden does it here. The folks that are still standing up for the Niger claim are those right-wing pundits, and Bush apologists, who were far from the White House when the cherry-picking decisions were being made. If the sixteen words were true, why leak, why backtrack, why admit fault? Simply be proud that you did your homework and stand behind the facts as they were originally set out. See, dear right-wingers, the facts were not facts, they were lies. The White House knows it (hence the destruction and subsequent cover-up of Joe Wilson and the entire Plame affair), why can't you accept it?

Basically I picture the White House in June 2003 as a bunch of sniveling, scared, little rats who realized that the jig was up, and yet, they were determined, at all cost, to keep the jig down.

For more on the descontruction of the White House spin, the media's playing along with that spin, and the shrill right-wing defense of that spin I suggest trips to (and in no paticular order) AMERICAblog, Booman Tribune, the Left Coaster, and for those of you more inclined to the visual I suggest Crooks & Liars. Go, I promise you will learn something.

(Cross-posted at State of the Day.)