Bush argument has "flaws"

Bush is back on the propaganda stump denying that the intelligence "failures" were being pushed from the White House. Attacking anyone that dares to disagree and anyone that now believes they were deceived. Bush’s main points, that everyone saw the same intell that he saw –lie, much of the NIE report was classified and his daily briefing is not public. Also, that most Democrats voted for the resolution allowing him to use force, lie. Most, 60 % of House Democrats and 21 Democratic Senators voted against the resolution. They have every right to be demanding answers to how Bush got us into this mess. It is undeniable that Bush was focused on war not diplomacy, that nothing was going to stop the battle train or even slow it down. He had to get into Iraq before the truth was allowed to get out. We would be welcomed with flowers and candy. Iraq’s oil would pay for everything. People who came out publicly before the war and said that this would not happen where silenced. By both the media and the White House. His hope is the media will again just print what he says without challenge and eventually the propaganda will sink in. From Bush's Third Campaign By Dan Froomkin Special to washingtonpost.com Monday, November 14, 2005; 3:33 PM But Bush's argument is deeply flawed. Far from being baseless, the charge that he intentionally misled the public in the run-up to war is built on a growing amount of evidence. And the longer Bush goes without refuting that evidence in detail, the more persuasive it becomes. And his most prized talking point -- that many Democrats agreed with him at the time -- is problematic. Many of those Democrats did so because they believed the information the president gave them. Now they are coming to the conclusion that they shouldn't have. Like other Bush campaigns, this one will inevitably feature the ceaseless repetition of key sound bytes -- the hope being that they will be carried, largely unchallenged, by the media -- and virulent attacks by the White House on those who dare to disagree, even going so far as to question their patriotism. The Coverage The coverage in most major papers made it clear that Bush's speech came within the context of a pitched battle over the president's reputation. Linton Weeks and Peter Baker wrote in The Washington Post: "President Bush and leading congressional Democrats lobbed angry charges at each other Friday in an increasingly personal battle over the origins of the Iraq war." Richard W. Stevenson wrote in the New York Times: "In responding so aggressively to the criticism, the White House seems to be throwing fuel on a political fire that it may not be able to control." Warren Vieth and James Gerstenzang wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "Bush's aggressive rhetoric, which coincided with a similar attack on Democrats by the Republican National Committee chairman, reflected growing White House concern over signs that the public's confidence in the president was slipping and that misgivings about Iraq were a principal cause of his problems." Milbank and Pincus The contextualizing of Bush's remarks was a welcome change from the more traditional, sometimes stenographic handling of a presidential speech. But as far as I saw, only Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus , writing in The Washington Post, actually analyzed Bush's arguments -- and found them wanting. They wrote: "President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence. "Neither assertion is wholly accurate." Milbank and Pincus explained that "Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material. And the commissions cited by officials, though concluding that the administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to change their conclusions, were not authorized to determine whether the administration exaggerated or distorted those conclusions." Read More: Washington Post