Crooks and Liars has the video up of Cheney being Cheney this morning on Meet the Press:
VICE PRES. CHENEY: So youâve got Iraq and 9/11, no evidence that thereâs a connection. Youâve got Iraq and al-Qaeda, testimony from the director of CIA that there was indeed a relationship, Zarqawi in Baghdad, etc. Then the third…
MR. RUSSERT: The committee said that there was no relationship. In fact…
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I havenât seen the report; I havenât had a chance to read it yet, but the fact is…
The “report” he hasn’t bothered to read is the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report released Friday, which revealed publicly for the first time the existence of an October 2005 CIA assessment which concluded that Saddam Hussein’s government “did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates.”
Go read the transcript. Historians will be puzzling over this artifact for the rest of our lives and beyond.
Why all of ABC/Disney’s bogus disclaimers don’t mean jack.
From the review of Path to 9/11 in the Providence Journal-Bulletin …
The two-part, five-hour ABC special airing Sunday and Monday at 8 p.m. on Channels 5 and 6 is compelling and confounding, gripping and disturbing. And itâs all completely true. The program, which gives TV docudramas a good name, is based on the 9/11 Commission Report, which was published in 2004.
All the details are documented. All the characters are real; so are the events, unfortunately.
Speaks for itself. And the Projo isn’t even a conservative paper.
Special thanks to TPM Reader YP, who’s keeping her eyes open.
I referred to Cheney’s appearance today on Meet the Press as an artificat that historians will be puzzling over for years to come. Not so, says TPM Reader JL:
Speaking as a historian, no historians won’t be puzzling, not at all. A future historian might state, matter of factly, “Vice President Cheney, one of the administration’s most ardent advocates of war with Iraq, continued to maintain that there was a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda long after the existence of such a connection had been disproved. Critics at the time noted that the Bush administration was unable to respond to changing circumstances in the Middle East because, instead of responding to new information, it simply reasserted its ideological premises. Subsequently historians have concluded this approach to problems was the chief reason for the Bush administration’s multiple failures, of which the debacle in Iraq is the most stunning – and, because of its lasting impact on America’s standing in the world – unfortunate example.”
From Powerline:
First the Senate Democrats browbeat a television network into changing a program so it won’t reflect badly on a Democratic administration. Then a Senate committee puts out a report that airbrushes history, leaving out the most important evidence of links between Iraq and al Qaeda, for the sole purpose of making a Republican administration look bad. I think it’s really important to work hard to get a Republican majority in the Senate, so the Dems won’t be able to pull stunts like these!
I’ve been going back and forth on whether this is the sarcastic post of a conservative irritated with Republicans on the Senate Intel Committee–or some bizarre new GOP meme that the Dems really control the Senate.
If it’s the former, it’s lame humor. If it’s the latter, well, where to even begin?
I yield the floor to TPM Reader WC:
I don’t think anyone of any political stripe could seriously argue that Tim Russert pulled punches in this morning’s interview of the vice president. But even in such an unrelenting interview, he neglected an angle of inquiry that I believe is uniformly neglected in all questions posed to the vice president about his statements in the run up to the Iraq invasion.
There’s a long, long litany (and Mr. Russert did a very representative job summarizing it this morning) of public statements that Mr. Cheney made during this period that were verifiably wrong. And these statements weren’t just wrong, they were, in almost every case, forceful and unquivocal, and finger-waggingly certain.
Now, there are essentially two, if you’ll permit the oversimplification, responses to this record: 1) He was intentionally deceptive (to whatever varying degree) in the service of marketing an invasion he favored (for whatever varying reason); and 2) He was unintentionally deceptive and in each case repeated incorrect assessments he had been given and genuinely believed.
Whenever an interviewer confronts Mr. Cheney with any portion of this litany of forcefully incorrect assertions, he is permitted to reply as though he were addressing the concerns exclusively of the first group (i.e. that he was deliberately deceptive.) And he manages in this vain to acquit himself fairly capably in an intricately-parsed technical sense. . . . But, granting him that then, I would like to see an interviewer seriously call him to task on behalf of the second camp.
Is the vice-president seriously allowed to express no remorse for the fact that he was so forcefully wrong. In public. So often. On so many matters. As they pertained to pre-emptively invading a sovereign nation?
The connotation of this morning’s interview (and several others) is that because he has (to his satisfaction) demonstrated that he wasn’t lying, criticisms of his statements are without merit. Does he consider it perfectly fine to receive and repeat (and make epic policy decisions based on) incorrect advice from clearly incapable advisors over and over and, well, ‘That’s what the pros we all trust told me, so: their fault, not mine?’
I would love to hear an interviewer ask him whether or not he considers himself sufficiently capable to gather diverging assesments from sources with various agendas and arrive at actionably accurate conclusions. And furthermore what he blames for his failure to do so so frequently in the past.
Amen.
American taxpayers paid for Halliburton executives in Iraq to watch the Super Bowl on a big-screen TV and eat their favorite comfort foods.
Lamont pulls to within margin of error of Lieberman in latest WSJ/Zogby Battleground States poll. Overall, the poll shows Dems still short of a Senate majority.
Are you a Republican political operative with experience in dirty tricks and campaign-related criminal conduct? It may be time to dust off your resume.
You may have noticed the article in Sunday’s Washington Post which explains that Republicans now believe that their only hope for avoiding electoral catastrophe in November is to put all their resources into hardball 
personal attacks against Democratic candidates around the country.
And who have they chosen to head up the effort?
According to the Post, that man is none other Terry Nelson.
And who is Terry Nelson?
Nelson has the unique distinction of being tied to two of the biggest cases of Republican campaign corruption in the Bush era. Nelson was implicated in the infamous New Hampshire phone-jamming scandal and he was an unindicted coconspirator in the political money-laundering case which ended Tom DeLay’s career.
If you’d like to do some of your own research at home, here’s the government’s witness list for the trial of arch-phone-jammer James Tobin. Nelson figures prominently on the list. (To the best of my knowledge, Nelson has steadfastly refused to answer questions regarding his role in the caper.) And here’s the indictment in the DeLay case where Nelson’s role in that case is explained at some length.
In any case, you get the idea.
Everything is on the line for these guys. So be prepared for literally anything over the next sixty days.
Why is the CIA suddenly encouraging its interrogators to buy insurance policies? That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.
It’s time to reevaluate Rudy Giuliani’s exalted 9/11 legacy.