Taunt-ology
by digby
Glenn Greenwald catches the Washington Post airbrushing history from their very own paper to protect President Bush from being called a liar when he even admitted to the lie. (These internets are dangerous boys. You can’t just go around doing this anymore because people will catch you.)
Greenwald writes:
It is now conclusively clear that President Bush lied last week, several days before the election, when he vowed definitively to reporters that Donald Rumsfeld would remain as Defense Secretary for the next two years. At the time he made that statement, he was deep into the process of replacing Rumsfeld, if not already finished, and the President knew that the statement he made about Rumsfeld was false at the time he made it. That is the definition of “lying.”
There can be no reasonable dispute about this, since the President at his Press Conference not only admitted lying when he told the reporters that Rumsfeld would stay, but he even went on to explain his reasons for lying (“the reason why is I didn’t want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign. And so the only way to answer that question and to get you on to another question was to give you that answer”). The decision was clearly a fait accompli before the election, as the President himself said: “win or lose, Bob Gates was going to become the nominee.”
[…]
At some point, the Post changed what was the accurate reporting — that Bush expressly acknowledged that he “misled” reporters because he had “indicated that he had made the decision to replace Rumsfeld before the elections” — by claiming in the new version that he merely “contemplated” Rumsfeld’s exit before the election. Worse, the Post deleted entirely the accurate statement that the President “appeared to acknowledge having misled reporters.” (If one does a search of the Post for the deleted paragraphs, the article will still come up in the Post’s search engine, but the entire passage is nowhere to be found in the article).
(Read the whole post for the amazing technicolor rationalizations of Howie Kurtz if nothing else.)
Clearly there was some pressure to remove from the historical record the fact that Bush knowingly lied to the public before the election. And the Washington Post clearly capitulated.
But ever since it happened I’ve been puzzled as to why Bush lied about it in the first place. It seemed to me when I heard about it that it would have been a good thing for him to at least signal obliquely that he would change course after the election rather than issue such unequivocal support. They had to know that the independent Republican leaners would have felt a little bit better about voting GOP if they thought that Bush was going to dump Rummy, right?
My guess is that Rove was worried about the reaction among kool-aid drinkers like Pamela Atlas Shrugged, which means that they have gone deep into the bunker and truly are communing with the crazies. Did Rove really come to believe that his turn-out strategy could trump a 13 point lead? What’s he smoking?
It is also probable that Bush, Cheney and Rove all believed that any sign they were listening to the opposition would be perceived as weakness by the terrorists which I think is one of their fundamental mistakes in running the war on terror. Like most immature bullies they attach much too much importance to silly schooolyard taunts:
Al Qaeda gloats over Rumsfeld
Nov 10, 2006 — BAGHDAD (Reuters) – A purported audio recording by the leader of Iraq’s al Qaeda wing gloated over the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as a top U.S. general said the military was preparing to recommend strategy changes.
Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, also known as Abu Ayyub al-Masri, said in the recording posted on the Internet on Friday that the group had 12,000 armed fighters and 10,000 others waiting to be equipped to fight U.S. troops in Iraq.
“I tell the lame duck (U.S. administration) do not rush to escape as did your defense minister…stay on the battle ground,” he said.
How much do you think Junior hates that? I would guess it bothers him quite a bit, judging from his rhetoric over the past five years.
I suspect they think the world sees things through the same schoolboy lens as they do and truly believed that if their voters saw al Qaeda dissing the Prez before the election they would recoil from their weakened leader in disgust. Perhaps they are right. And I suspect they couldn’t take the idea of Democrats gloating (we are pretty much the same as al Qaeda in their minds) either.
But backing Rumsfeld so stongly before the election actually made him look cracked in the head, which is a selling point with his cult, but makes everyone else increasingly nervous. I believe it was a serious miscalculation, which is why somebody’s calling up the Washington Post and instructing them to airbrush history.
Update: AJEsquire in the comments may have this right. I hadn’t thought of it. Gates is a family retainer. They didn’t need any lead time to get him on board.
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