Wall Street Journal resurrects inane talking point

November 3, 2005

Criticizing the absurdity of a Wall Street Journal editorial usually seems unnecessary — fishes, barrels, and firearms come to mind. But because the paper’s editorial board seems intent on resurrecting a long-discredited talking point, and because it seems to be part of a trend in conservative circles, it’s worth taking a moment to consider.

In an editorial today, the WSJ, responding to Harry Reid’s closed session this week, wants to shift responsibility for failures in pre-war intelligence so that Dems are as culpable as the White House.

The scandal here isn’t what happened before the war. The scandal is that the same Democrats who saw the same intelligence that Mr. Bush saw, who drew the same conclusions, and who voted to go to war are now using the difficulties we’ve encountered in that conflict as an excuse to rewrite history. Are Republicans really going to let them get away with it?

Even by the standards of the Journal’s editorial board, this is silly. Worse, it’s outdated.

A year ago, Bush tried to defend himself on the campaign trail with the same nonsense. In the first Bush-Kerry debate, Bush said, on four occasions, that he and Kerry “looked at the same intelligence” before the war in Iraq began.

“The intelligence I looked at was the same intelligence my opponent looked at, the very same intelligence. And when I stood up there and spoke to the Congress, I was speaking off the same intelligence he looked at to make his decisions to support the authorization of force.”

It wasn’t true then — and it hasn’t improved with age.

The Kerry campaign thoroughly debunked the very idea as soon as Bush started emphasizing it.

“Kerry did not have access to the same intelligence,” former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke, a foreign policy adviser to the Democrat, said on ABC’s “This Week” program. Mr. Holbrooke said the president had the advantage of ‘unique intelligence,’ which he said was significant since the Congress was not made fully aware that all administration experts did not believe the tubes were intended to produce a nuclear weapon.

Spokesman Joe Lockhart made the same point on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“Let me make one correction on what the president said during the debate, and this is something that’s widely known in Washington,” said Mr. Lockhart. “United States senators don’t have access to the same intelligence that the president does.”

More recently, Paul Begala also helped remind everyone of how wrong the claim is.

“[T]he White House is who provides the intelligence to the Congress and the notion that the Congress sees the same intelligence as the president is nonsense.

“I used to work in the White House and I used to work on the Congress. I can tell you, presidents and this president especially, treats Congress like a mushroom factory, keeps them in the dark and feeds them manure.”

I realize the Wall Street Journal is uncomfortable with the notion of accountability. I can also appreciate that it’s awkward for them to accept the idea that Bush is responsible for what the paper calls the “difficulties we’ve encountered in that conflict.” But there’s one man who saw all the intelligence, one man who ignored skeptics, and one man who started this war.

Is the Wall Street Journal going to let him get away with it? Apparently so.

There’s the little issue of the UN weapons inspectors who spent a whole lot of time in Iraq finding a whole lot of nothing. Clinton didn’t have the benefit of their presence on the ground.

Lots of people forget that there were experienced people in Iraq before the war & they were telling us what we now know to be true – there were no weapons there that were of any threat to the United States.

Any time some winger brings up a 2002 quote by Kerry or Clinton – I have to remind them of this. That’s usually the end of the discussion for some reason.

  • If Bush had access to intel nobody else did, and people voted on the basis of Bush “vouching” for the intel, then the issue is one of TRUST, plain and simple. When you violate that trust, you deserve punishment.

    The same exact thing is true of Judy Miller. When you cite anonymous sources, the reader is in the position of having to trust your judgment as to credibility because the reader is denied the possibility of doing it himself.

    TRUST

  • This is infuriating. Bob Graham and Carl Levin were respectively the chairs of the Senate Intel and Armed Services committee at the time of that horrible resolution to authorize force in fall 2002. Both were complaining that the documents given to Congress on the eve of the vote were substantially different than what the classified versions said in their respective committee. Anyone who perpetrates this fraud under the name of journalism needs to be taken back behind the woodshed.

  • “But there’s one man who saw all the intelligence, one man who ignored skeptics, and one man who started this war.”

    Aw, quit pickin’ on Cheney already.

    Maybe they are hanging their hat on the proposition that Cheney & Co. did have all the intelligence, but that Cheny & Co. only gave the President so much (his wittew mind couwd not handew such gwand concepts as “intewwigence”) and then that was what was provided to Congress. Doubtful, yes.

  • Even a kindergartner knows that the
    Congress got fed what the administration
    wanted them to see.

    But the most horrifying aspect of all this
    is that apparently it’s not just the
    Republicans who want to bury the
    truth about the most heinous crime
    ever in U.S. history, it’s the Democrats
    who voted for Bush’s authorization,
    the media, and the press too, because
    they were all complicit in building
    the fraudulent case for war. And the
    worst offender from the press/media
    might actually be The New York
    Times, because no one suspected
    them of such duplicity.

    William Rivers Pitt makes the point
    quite eloquently here:

    http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/110305I.shtml

    Because of this “vast conspiracy,” I think it’s
    unlikely that supergate (what else can you
    call it?) will ever be exposed.

  • I have subscribed to the Wall Street Journal since 1980.
    I am going to let my subscription lapse. In retrospect I should
    have done this years ago, when the WSJ Editoral page was
    the vanguard for the Richard M. Scaife funded anti-Clinton
    attack machine. As Vince Foster noted, the Editors of the
    Wall Street Journal lie and they are totally shameless about it.

    I wrote Karen Elliot House, the Publisher of the WSJ to complain
    about the syncophantic worship of G.W. Bush. She wrote back
    and noted that the Editors actually criticized Dear Leader when
    it came to steel tarrifs.

    As a number of people whave noted, the left and the right
    are increasingly living in different realities. On the left we
    tend to read the New York Times and, perhaps, blogs like
    Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, The Washington Note and,
    of course, The Carpetbagger Report. On the right they
    read the WSJ, The Washington Times or the New York Post
    and blogs like Powerline and the NRO. I don’t watch
    television, but I assume that the left and the right watches
    different television (the right obviously watching Fox News).
    For those who actually read books, we read different books
    as well.

    All this leads to self-reinforcing, separate realities. I’m sure
    that this separation in self-reinforcing world view is one
    reason that the United States is so polarized. Although I’m
    happy to say that the polar opposite that thinks that G.W. Bush
    is a brilliant man and great president seems to be diminishing
    by the day.

  • Sorry to be nitpicky, but that bit at the end just isn’t right. You seem to be implying that Bush “saw all the intelligence”, and I’m sorry, but I’m just not buying that. There’s no way in hell that Bush saw all the intelligence, and he certainly didn’t read it. He read summaries of it which were created in a way that he wanted them to be; and I betcha he didn’t give a very good reading of those either. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of us diligent bloggers knew more about the intel than Bush did.

    And it’s done like that by design. These people have taken Plausible Deniability to a whole new level. Bush isn’t a liar. He’s just intentionally ignorant. That may be a whole lot worse, but it’s also a lot harder to prove.

  • The Bush White House is incapable of anything more than lies and smears. Even some Republicans are sick of it, as evidenced by this excerpt from Joe Klein’s column in Time online:

    But it is an even better indication of how the White House reflexively dealt with unpleasant news: destroy the messenger. Last week there was more of the same, according to a prominent Republican, who told me that the White House had sent out talking points about how to attack Brent Scowcroft after Bush the Elder’s National Security Adviser went public with his opposition to the war in the New Yorker magazine. “I was so disgusted that I deleted the damn e-mail before I read it,” the Republican said. “But that’s all this White House has now: the politics of personal destruction.”

  • Excuse Me: You’re all missing another point. Don’t you remember that the lying little drunk also sold the war by raving about the wmd threat — BUT TELLING US OVER AND OVER THAT HE’S SEEN INTELLIGENCE THAT THE REST OF US (AND CONGRESS) CAN’T SEE — BECAUSE IT WOULD COMPROMISE SOURCES ? REMEMBER ??

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