(Click on the logo to return to the main blog.)

Sometimes "I Misspoke" Is the Truth
09/17/2003

I've probably gone too far in disregarding every report of "backtracking" among Bush administration officials, but it's been over a year now that every single one of these innuendo-rich accusations has proven, upon thorough consideration, to have been much less condemnatory than the media et al. make them out to be. Consider this one from WorldNetDaily:

Vice President Dick Cheney over the weekend withdrew an alarming assertion he made on national television, on the eve of war, about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

"We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons," Cheney said March 16 on NBC's "Meet the Press."

This sounded familiar, so I did some rifling through my usual sources and found a thorough debunking of this very accusation against the VP by Eugene Volokh:

If people actually looked at the entire transcript — or even searched for the word "nuclear" — they'd see that throughout the interview, Cheney was acknowledging that Saddam didn't yet have nuclear weapons ("Done absolutely everything he could to try to acquire that capability," "trying once again to produce nuclear weapons," "his pursuit of nuclear weapons," and especially "only a matter of time until he acquires nuclear weapons.")

What's more, the quote about "pursuit of nuclear weapons" comes immediately before the question in reply to which Cheney mentioned "reconstituted nuclear weapons." The one quote that people seize on must surely be Cheney misspeaking, not trying "to mislead the American public" or "reckless[ly] exaggerat[ing]."

Cheney hasn't "withdrawn an assertion"; he's corrected a minor conversational typo.

I haven't been paying attention to the political arena for long, but I've never seen anything in my life approximating the media treatment of the Bush administration. They can't even misspeak by one word throughout their entire careers without it being permanently affixed to the "mountain of evidence" of deceit. The people who are intent on keeping these things alive (some, apparently, on a repeated cycle to allow folks to forget the immediate context) ought to take their obsessiveness to be a red flag for themselves.

Posted by Justin Katz @ 12:12 PM EST