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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (71877)	2/6/2003 3:54:06 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The point, to be a bit more clear about it, is that if you accept Powell's version about the tubes, which I think we all do--heck, you said somewhere that you might vote for him if he runs as a Presidential candidate, so I assume you believe him--then the only effective counter-argument is that Powell was lying about the tubes. I doubt that he is misinformed about something so critical. I neither accept nor reject Powell's point about the tubes. I argued that putting them forward as part of his argument might have weakened it slightly because the dual use argument about them rendered them controversial. I am not thus arguing that he did or did not fib about them. I thought, in fact, given what I've learned subsequently, that, and this is excellent debating technique as well all know, he offered the correct qualifier for the tubes argument, that it was controversial, then offered his own view of that argument. Not a bad tactic. I don't know many other ways to argue this. I'm not saying he was lying and don't think he was lying. I was arguing that he may have chosen, for that particular part of his presentation, an argument that, once seen as weak, slightly weakened the overall presentation. But that he took that into account by noting the argument was a controversial one. Lying or not is not even in the equation. As for the presidential bit, that was said as a sort of jest. I thought the presentation was powerful, that his own credibility gave it some of that power, a power that Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz or Cheney or Bush would not have had with the same speech. If I were looking for a wartime president, a time in which I thought it was necessary to give up on improving domestic programs, and the country needed the most credible leadership possible, he would be well up on my list.