Maine Owl

Exit strategy


Maddow & O'Donnell on the "rewrite"


End Times Countdown - Bush Exit Interviews

This makes a fine pair from a couple of nights ago on Rachel Maddow and The Daily Show. Certainly it is confounding to hear Bush prevaricate about his "regrets" about "bad intelligence" on Iraq. Gerald laid that out well earlier in the week:

BUSH: I don't know -- the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn't just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that's not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.

Obviously, Bush gives a false impression of how the PR worked to game the war. The story is told in many places, including in Maine Owl HERE, and HERE where evidence Bush knew there were no WMD two months before the war is offered.

But why is Bush running this particular script now? Lawrence O'Donnell on Maddow is just about on the mark about this:

O'DONNELL: Well, blame the CIA is step number one. Blame the CIA for that slam-dunk that George Tenet said about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. You have pointed out the problem with that strategy. The president has said, not just on video but also in-depth to Bob Woodward, and he said this many times that knowing what he knows now, he still would have invaded Iraq, knowing that there were no weapons of mass destruction.

So, this is going to be an ongoing struggle over the decades. And there are many reasons why the president can't pull away from that position. One of them is very personal. And this comes out in the work of Woodward and others. He has had close encounters in military hospitals with families of soldiers who are wounded and, you know, hurt for life. He's met with the families of the dead. He cannot bring himself to say to them-we went to war for a mistake, if that mistake had not been made, your son would be alive today. [emphasis added]

The only quibble I have is that it wasn't a "mistake," it was an intentional taking of Iraq--one of the greatest transgressions of world history--a fact Bush will spend the rest of his life obscuring.

The Daily Show covers the same ground in a way only The Daily Show can. They're the only ones who can make a "puppy chipper" funny.