Thursday, June 24, 2004

One interesting result of the controversy as to exactly how much the Administration was lying about an Al Queda-Iraq connection is that folks are going back and trying to figure out how they actually went about it. Here, for instance, is Matt Yglesias on Bush's Gricean implicatures.

posted by RC @ 7:53 PM   1 comments

1 Comments:

At November 8, 2004 at 11:53 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

If the goal is to prove that the adminstration lied to justify invading Iraq, then one rhetorical strategy of the Bush admin. that we (of all people) should be able to point to is how the various excuses for invading Iraq were initially offered serially, not in concert with each other. If I recall, first they said there was an Al-Queda link, but that didn't hold water. So, they moved on to saying that Iraq had WMD's. But that didn't really pan out either. So, then, they started telling us what a horrible man Hussein was/is (which we all know is true, but there are lots of countries in the world being led by horrible people--the U.S., for example: we should invade ourselves.)

I don't recall how it came to be that these excueses are now remembered as being offered simultaneously. And I don't know how it came to be that the originally insufficient excuses came to be accepted by so many Americans as, now, acceptable. But I do know that things would have been different had the mainstream media been willing to point out this obviously shifty progression of excuses as it was unfolding.

Imagine if Bush were taken to a U.S. criminal court for going to Iraq. Now imagine, given how our justice system works, Bush's attorneys starting with one defense, then moving to another when that didn't work, then moving to another when that didn't work. There's no way they would ever be allowed to. Yet that's exactly what we, as a country, allowed them to do.

Lance Massey (RFP member)

 

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