Sen. Kit Bond gave a short speech this afternoon which differed substantially from the ‘prepared remarks’ sent out to journalists in advance. If I’m not mistaken one of his ad-libs was a charge that former Kerry foreign policy advisor had gotten caught “putting the president’s PDBs into his BVDs.”
A class act, that Kit Bond.
I’m a little embarrassed since Bond is the Senator from the state of my birth. But setting his smarminess aside, the accuracy of his riff on Berger is actually apropos of the rest of his remarks.
Bond’s remarks were focused on claiming that President Bush had been vindicated in the ’16 words’ he used in his 2003 State of the Union speech about Iraq seeking uranium from Niger.
I can’t quote his words specifically because they included so many ad-libs from the prepared text. But the substance of it was that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had discredited the charges against the White House on this point and found that the president’s statement was “well-founded.”
Though Bond is on the Intelligence Committee, I doubt he had much involvement in the Committee’s work or the Report. But if he did, he certainly knows that the Report intentionally left out a number of facts that came out of the committee’s investigation, which — had they been revealed — would have placed the Niger matter in a very different light. Many of them center around a particular country that goes almost unmentioned in the Senate Report.
A lot more should be coming out about that Report in the next couple weeks and on the Niger matter. Make a note of Bond’s remarks for future reference.
