Sighhhhh. I can't get my head around why it isn't important to you. But then, perhaps you think Bush was lying all along.
OK. The light bulb is beginning to glow. It's beginning to look like you're treating this as a matter of support for Bush and I'm treating it as a matter of logic. Ne'er the twain shall meet. <g>
First of all, to be sure you understand where I'm coming from, I am not among those who think Bush lied. I'm on record that such a view comes from either severe distrust or partisanship. The closest I can get to that is that Bush may have been too quick to believe what supported his predisposition, a ubiquitous trait among humans, and passive about correcting mistaken impressions, such as the widespread one that Iraqis were on the planes, when they suited his purposes. That's as close as I can get to faulting Bush in the honesty department.
Secondly, I never thought that the invasion of Iraq was a wise move even assuming that everything Bush claimed was true. So please understand that I have no stake in whether the things Bush is accused of lying about are true or not. Others may have based their support of the war on Bush's claims so errors in the claims may cause second thoughts and a painful reevaluation of their judgment. That is not the case with me so I have no ego invested in whether those claims were true or not.
As you know, I am not a Bush supporter. I don't hate him. I simply disagree with him on just about every priority he has and decision he's made. Bush and I have nothing in common politically. He's liberal where my libertarian self wants him to be conservative and conservative where it wants him to be liberal. You, OTOH, are a devotee. I understand the motivation of devotees to come to the rescue whenever their champion is in anyone's cross-hairs. So if my ho-hum reaction to Putin's story looks to you like part of the liar chorus, I can understand that. And I can understand why devotees feel the need to defend their champion whether or not the matter in question makes any sense.
But I do look at what makes sense and this one makes no sense, which is what I've been arguing. Outside the political context, at least. Intel has been notoriously bad. Even Bush has said so. So the fact that Putin provided some intel about Saddam's designs on us indicates nothing more than that Putin heard something that he thought important enough to share. Whatever it was, the US apparently didn't act upon it. Which leaves us with a big so-what. We already knew that intel was being shared. We already knew that the whole world thought Saddam had WMDs and was cozy with AQ. So what does Putin's statement add to that? Nothing, best I can tell. The only way you can make it into something is to suspend logic and assign it to the Bush win column. I realize that devotees suspend logic regularly. I believe it's called "belief." Believers are entitled to their beliefs. Logic is another matter.
I am curious tho', to see how these people are going to spin the Putin comment this next week.
I will watch, too. |
