August 26, 2004
The Next Big Thing
justoneminute.typepad.com
Deborah Norville of MSNBC hosted a discussion about the Swift Boats Veterans for Truth - a transcript should become available here. [edit: not there yet - check site later]
One of her guests was Kate Zernike, a national reporter for the NY Times, who had a byline on "Bush Campaign's Top Outside Lawyer Advised Veterans Group".
Near the conclusion, Ms. Zernike was asked to predict what the next big story would be that would deflect the media from the Swift Boat controversy. Her suggestion - when the US death toll in Iraq reached 1,000, the media would re-focus on that.
Ahh! Presumably, the NY Times is preparing their retrospective right now - how did we get into this mess, is it a quagmire, where did Bush go wrong, and so on.
Since we are now at 966 deaths (which is 966 too many), the Times launch point should be sometime in September. Forewarned is forearmed. Folks looking backward will want copies of Kerry's Senate floor speech from October 2002. The Spinsanity "imminent threat" analysis" will probably be helpful; the Senate Intel report is here; other suggestions are welcomed, natch. (Abu Grahib, "Mission Accomplished"... the capture of Saddam?!?)
But no Iraq retrospective will be complete unless we continue to vex Tall John with the "if you knew then what you know now" question about his vote authorizing war, and the subsequent policy decisions made by Bush - it's been fun so far, and we see that Kerry advisor Jamie Rubin, who briefly got us into the endzone by saying that "in all probability" Kerry would have deposed Saddam, has since recanted. The NY Times, among others, has pummelled Kerry for his puzzling explanations of what he might have done differently.
Or, folks looking forward to see which candidate has the more credible plan for a stable and democratic Iraq will want to dust off these LA Times, AP, and WaPo pieces - all deride Kerry's "plan" for Iraq. |
