Should Bush have ignored these Democrats statements? They sound a little 'pushy' to me.
"Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime ... He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation ... And now he is miscalculating America's response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction ... So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real..."
- Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Jan. 23. 2003 | Source
"There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years ... We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction."
- Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D, WV), Oct 10, 2002 | Source
"In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda members ... It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons."
- Sen. Hillary Clinton (D, NY), Oct 10, 2002 | Source
No matter how many times these Democrat quotes are posted, Liberals are still intent on saying Bush lied. Democrats saw the same intelligence Bush did. Woodward is correct.......Bush did not lie.
Bush had to have lied because there were no WMDs, and he said, definitively, that there were.
How is that not a lie?
Bush merely believed the information provided by US and allied intel agencies, just as the Democrats did. Were they all lying?
They believed what they wanted to believe and touted only the evidence, no matter how flimsy, to back up their belief. They fixed the facts around the policy of invasion. For example:
The White House, though, embraced the disputed theory that the tubes were for nuclear centrifuges, an idea first championed in April 2001 by a junior analyst at the C.I.A. Senior nuclear scientists considered that notion implausible, yet in the months after 9/11, as the administration built a case for confronting Iraq, the centrifuge theory gained currency as it rose to the top of the government.
Senior administration officials repeatedly failed to fully disclose the contrary views of America's leading nuclear scientists, an examination by The New York Times has found. They sometimes overstated even the most dire intelligence assessments of the tubes, yet minimized or rejected the strong doubts of nuclear experts. They worried privately that the nuclear case was weak, but expressed sober certitude in public.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/international/middleeast/03tube.html?_r=0
The New York Times is a proven mouthpiece for the Left that leaves out "all the news that does not fit the Narrative." Bob Woodward is hardly to be considered a mouthpiece for Conservatives. History has proven that.
Here's some history:
"[ I]t's Woodward's reporting during the Bush administration that best debunks the farcical the notion that he is a "liberal" ally.
He did that both through his fawning coverage of the Bush White House, especially in the early years, and by becoming a major player in the scandal surrounding CIA operative Valerie Plame.
At the same time Woodward was being granted extraordinary access to the Bush White House and to Bush himself in order to write his war-themed books, Woodward helped delay the Plame whodunit.
He did it by failing, for two years, to reveal that a senior Bush administration official had told him that former ambassador Joe Wilson's wife, Plame, worked at the CIA.
Worse, prior to his shocking revelation, Woodward had made the media rounds minimizing the scandal as "
laughable,"
"an accident," "nothing to it" and denigrating Fitzgerald as "disgraceful" and "junkyard dog,"
never once noting mentioning he'd been on the receiving end of a leak about Plame.
Woodward sat on the scoop for more than two years, later insisting the information he had received about Plame was insignificant; not newsworthy. But if his scoop had been revealed months earlier -- let alone years earlier -- it would have created enormous political and legal problems for the Bush White House.
As blogger Glenn Greenwald
wrote in 2005:
It is most ironic to listen to Woodward insist that he has not become too cozy with the Bush Administration as a result of the unique and lucrative access they give to him, while he simultaneously sounds exactly like an Administration defense lawyer shamelessly and vigorously defending both himself and Administration officials from every conceivable charge of wrongdoing concerning the Plame scandal. If Scott McClellan or Lewis Libby's lawyers had answered the same questions from [CNN's Larry] King, it's hard to see a single answer which would have been different.
And yes, during Bush's first term Woodward became extremely cozy with the Republican president.
In early 2002, Woodward helped write an eight-part, 40,000-word series in the Washington Post, "
10 Days in September: Inside the War Cabinet." It provided an inside glimpse into how the administration dealt with the Sept. 11 attacks and mapped out its strategy for the war on terrorism.
Conservatives
cheered the series, suggesting it was a Pulitzer Prize must-win. The far-right raves were understandable: "10 Days in September: Inside the War Cabinet" erased any suggestion of Bush as an inexperienced leader.
To say the series presented the administration, and Bush in particular, in a glowing light would be an understatement. The young president was depicted as being utterly sure of himself, operating on gut instincts, leading round-table discussions, formulating complex strategies, asking pointed questions, building international coalitions, demanding results, poring over speeches and seeking last-minute phrase changes.
That hagiography-like approach soon found its way into Woodward's 2002 book, Bush At War. As Salon
noted, it offered a "a portrait of the president-as-resolute-war-leader that put him in a league with Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt." (It took Woodward five more years before he wrote a book about how badly the White House had mismanaged the Iraq War.)
But here's all you need to know about Woodward and his supposed status as a beacon of the left:
-September 11, 2012
-September 26, 2012
-October 5, 2012
-October 26, 2012
-November 7, 2012
-November 30, 2012
-February 28, 2013
Those are the dates of Woodward's most recent sit-down Fox News interviews with Sean Hannity. And yes, last night Woodward
agreed with Hannity that the press should have
asked more questions about Bill Ayers during the 2008 campaign.
Case closed."
