YES... VAGUE!
WHO IS "WE"? ...
WHAT EVIDENCE?
Yes, you wrote, "the entire prosecution of the war was thoroughly investigated." You realize, of course, that the issue at hand, and Mr. Bush's remark, hasn't a thing to do with prosecuting the war? It's about the means used to justify it before it began to be prosecuted.
The lead-up and justification is part of the prosecution. The commissions looked at every single detail of the intelligence information submitted to the UN, all the public records and accounts of what was said by members of the administrations of Bush and Blair, and found NO LIE was told. PERIOD!
At some point, one has to realize that a former President of the U.S. had nothing at all to gain by making that statement.
Well of course he does. He is attempting to try and repair the damage done to his legacy. He says in the same interview that
he wants to be remembered as a decent man who tried to do the right thing. Bush has never been very good with his words and in this case, "fabricated" was somewhat less appropriate than his made-up "misoverexaggerated."
I don't know why you think Dick Cheney's words are less important. He was the central figure in the prosecution of the war along with Powell, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.
Just because Bush was his "boss" doesn't mean Bush is telling the truth and Cheney is lying.
You know good and well that nobody is going to "this year" say they "last year" lied when for the entirety of the intervening "year" there were resounding screams of "you lied last year" from all corners except one's own. People don't and can't "come clean" about the truth; if they've already told the truth, there's nothing to "come clean" about. People "come clean" because they know they lied, not the other way round.
Red:
You are just being gratuitously ridiculous and obstinate now. You obviously read the article; you know damn well who "we" is.
Even if you weren't to have clicked on the link, "we" is a first person, nominative case, plural pronoun; regardless of whom "we" includes in its entirety, at the very least it includes the person who says it. The speaker of the statement I shared was George W. Bush.
Blue:
Did even Mr. Bush's most strident opponents (re: whether to go to war with Iraq) actually believe in their heart of hearts that he didn't at a bare minimum construe his Presidential actions, and those he instructed and/or allowed his Administration to carry out, as being "the right thing" to do at the time? I seriously doubt anyone who ever met the man thought him an indecent man. His amicable personality is among his strengths. I don't know a single person who think him not a "decent man;" I have seen and heard plenty characterize him as "not the brightest light in the chandelier." Even at that, however, the man isn't so dim he doesn't know when he's lied and when he has told the truth.
Green:
I'll tell you why. Because Mr. Cheney was Vice President and Mr. Bush was President. That means that, at the end of the day, the responsibility for the Bush Administration did, even what Mr. Cheney did, ultimately must be borne by Mr. Bush. The "buck stopped" with George not Dick.
Purple:
From a logical argument standpoint, you are correct. As a practical reality, it does. When your boss says, "we fabricated evidence," s/he himself and/or the organization s/he heads did, unless one can show that enough of the information given to your boss was a deliberate misrepresentation of facts on yours or other advisors' part, thereby making the misrepresentation not the direct doing of the person in charge. Even so, the person in charge must still accept a degree of the burden, even if not to a causal extent.
Thinking about motivating factors for either man to have the position they do, consider Mr. Cheney's. Look at what people who know and/or have carefully studied him say:
- "Cheney's doctrine was cast-iron strength at all times -- never apologize, never explain."
- John P. Hannah, Cheney's second-term national security adviser, said the former vice president is driven, now as before, by the nightmare of a hostile state acquiring nuclear weapons and passing them to terrorists....He really feels he has an obligation "to save the country from danger"
- Barton Gellman
- Bruce Fein, Asst. Deputy Atty General, '81-'83
- With regard to Dick Cheney -- and he hired me to be a counsel on the Iran-Contra committee -- at that time he was unflappable, seemed very measured and restrained. Now, maybe it was because when you sit in the minority, you don't have a whole lot of authority. … But certainly with regard to his analysis and his lack of efforts to discredit the idea of separation of powers -- even though the Boland Amendment at that time, which was the big issue, curtailed the president's discretion in many respects in Nicaragua supporting the resistance there, he said you could criticize it as unwise, but it wasn't unconstitutional. It wasn't as though Dick Cheney said, "Well, Reagan should just ignore the law, pretend it isn't there," which is what President Bush does with regard to many of the limits on his authority.
- Colin Powell:
Political psychologist Aubrey Immelman et al studied Mr. Cheney and arrived at the following:
Cheney’s primary personality pattern was found to be Conscientious/dutiful. His secondary pattern was Dominant/controlling. Cheney also had an elevated score on the Distrusting (suspicious) pattern; however, it did not reach a diagnostically relevant (i.e., paranoid) scale elevation. Leaders with an amalgam of Conscientious (obsessive) and Dominant (aggressive) patterns such as those evident in Cheney’s profile are best characterized as obsessive enforcers who:
- Display a moralistic conscience, permeated by a strong power motive.
- Are sticklers for rules and propriety, they are unrestrained in discharging their hostile impulses against those whom they find contemptible — ostensibly in the public interest.
- Not only act as though they have a monopoly on divining right and wrong, but also believe they have a right and the obligation to control and punish transgressors, and that they are uniquely qualified to determine how punishment should be meted out.
- Although they operate under the guise of legitimate socially sanctioned roles to serve the public interest, the deeper motives that spur the aggressive enforcing actions of leaders with this personality style are of questionable legitimacy, given the extraordinary force with which they are willing to mete out condemnation and punishment.
In the context of public service, the trademark characteristic of obsessive enforcers is first to search out rule-breakers and perpetrators of infractions that fall within the purview of their socially sanctioned role, and then to exercise what they view as their legitimate powers to the max.
The
modus operandi of the obsessive enforcer invariably provokes opposition and resistance, which in turn incites and perpetuates ever-stronger countermeasures against real and perceived enemies. Their resulting "bunker mentality" may mimic a paranoid orientation, but more likely is simply a manifestation of hardball politics in the service of an obdurate, relentless, uncompromising, no-holds-barred striving to preserve and consolidate personal power and control.
In public life the fatal flaw of the "obsessive enforcer" leadership style is that, in carrying out their duties, these leaders may find it difficult to restrain the emotions that drive their controlling behaviors. Ultimately, dominating everything and everyone may become their single-minded goal, at the expense of exercising their responsibilities in a prudent, measured, self-restrained manner.
The major political implication of the study is that it sheds light on the extraordinary degree of power and influence that Vice President Cheney wielded in the Bush administration, and the former vice president's apparent reluctance to follow the lead of former President George W. Bush in departing from the political arena upon completing his term of office.
If collectively that doesn't point to Mr. Cheney's lack of willingness to report an objective truth about whether the Bush Administration lied about the facts it used to justify the Iraq war, I don't know what will. If you just want to believe Mr. Cheney's view of things because it's what
