I Cogitate

Special Comment
Keith Olbermann
September 4, 2007

And so he is back from his annual surprise gratuitous photo-op in Iraq, and what a sorry spectacle it was. But it was nothing compared to the spectacle of one unfiltered, unguarded, horrifying quotation in the new biography to which Mr. Bush has consented.

As he deceived the troops at Al-Asad Air Base yesterday with the tantalizing prospect that some of them might not have to risk being killed and might get to go home, Mr. Bush probably did not know that, with his own words, he had already proved that he had been lying, is lying and will be lying about Iraq.

He presumably did not know that there had already appeared those damning excerpts from Robert Draper's book “Dead Certain."

“I'm playing for October-November," Mr. Bush said to Draper. That, evidently, is the time during which, he thinks he can sell us the real plan, which is “to get us in a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence."

Comfortable, that is, with saying about Iraq, again quoting the President, “stay... longer."

And there it is. We've caught you. Your goal is not to bring some troops home, maybe, if we let you have your way now. Your goal is not to set the stage for eventual withdrawal. You are, to use your own disrespectful, tone-deaf word, playing at getting the next Republican nominee to agree to jump into this bottomless pit with you, and take us with him, as we stay in Iraq for another year, and another, and another, and anon.

Everything you said about Iraq yesterday, and everything you will say, is a deception, for the purpose of this one cynical, unacceptable, brutal goal: perpetuating this war indefinitely.

War today, war tomorrow, war forever!

...This country cannot run the risk of what you can still do to this country in the next 500 days.

Not while you are playing.

True or false: Can Bush tell difference?
Andrew Greeley
September 5, 2007

Is President Bush able to distinguish truth from falsehood? Is he too caught up in the double-talk generated by his spin masters to grasp the difference? After reading his talk to the VFW last week, I think that at this stage of his presidency he is utterly incapable of honest communication with the rest of the country.

Objectively, his claim that the United States can win in Iraq, his comment that the Iraqi prime minister is a good guy and his history of the Vietnam War go far beyond the boundaries of truth. Granted, the speech was ground out by one of the spin masters (perhaps trained in dishonesty by Karl Rove), the president ultimately is responsible for it. It follows logically from all the falsehoods going back to weapons of mass destruction. It is contradicted by the intelligence estimate released the same day by the director of National Intelligence. The killing continues, the Iraq government is not improving, the war continues.

And, one would add, Americans continue to die.

Why does the president continue to deny the obvious, even when his own intelligence agency affirms it? Because some conservatives insist the United States could have won the Vietnam War if it hadn't ''lost its nerve''? There is no serious support for this folklore. The only similarity is both wars were foolish wars for which there was no good reason, the United States was doomed to defeat from the beginning, and if someone had not pulled the plug, we'd still be fighting in Vietnam, just as we are still fighting -- perhaps forever -- in Iraq.

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