Bush Lied, People Died

Talking Points Memo reports on the release of the long-long-awaited Phase II report of the Senate Intelligence Committee into pre-war intelligence and its uses and abuses.

Politics is a conversation, a dialectic, a debate. Some silly folks think of a debate as a competition to display superior argument. More realistically, it is a battle of action and reaction, in which each side tries to lead the other, both by what is asserted, and by reacting strategically. The reaction shapes what is said next, as much, or more than what is said. Over the last 40 years, the Right in the United States has been the past masters of strategic reaction, utilizing manufactured outrage over supposed gaffes like artillery on the political battleground. Their paid minions in the Media manipulate the propaganda landscape with both a failure to react, and with the ability to react with high dudgeon.

Nowhere has that been clearer than in the long, sad career of the Bush Administration. Here we have documentation of Bush and his Administration lying the country into a disastrous war. Surely, it is a useful supplement to Press Secretary McClellan's confessional.

But, how will Media pundits and Republican slimeballs (is there any other kind?) react? With McClellan, it was a remarkably coordinated sadness at the betrayal -- that would be McClellan's betrayal of Bushian colleagues, not Bush's traitorous betrayal of the country.

So many scandals, so little reaction among the Media pundits. Atrios asked today if there was a single Media Talking Head, who shared the majority opinion of the country on Iraq. He might as well have asked if there was a single Talking Head with a moral spine or sense.

It is not as if Iraq stands alone. Bush has screwed up Afganistan as well, and never captured Osama Bin Laden. Political prosecutions by the Justice Department have been identified. White House officials outed a CIA agent. The top 3 officials at the CIA resigned in a corruption scandal; does anyone remember that? The top two officials at the Air Force were forced to resign today, after a corruption scandal and some missing nukes!!! The list goes on and on.