Whenever I get lazy and think Stephen Harper is the worst leader imaginable – I am reminded that things could be far far worse.
To sum up, one of the following possibilities must explain this situation:
1.) President Bush was given all the relevant information about Iran’s nuclear capabilities (or, more accurately, the lack thereof) and ignored it.
2.) President Bush was given all the relevant information, and simply decided to lie about it.
3.) President Bush was given all the relevant information, then forgot about it because he saw, I don’t know, a cute puppy or something.
3.) President Bush was never given said relevant information, because what the hell would he do with it?
5.) SPACE ALIENS.
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10 users responded in this post
Re: #5? I’d like to think that even Skrulls have standards.
But Kree don’t.
I’ll take door numbers 4 and 2, in that order. He’s fed analysis filtered through a particular organizational agenda/groupthink, and then he and his circle bend that material to fit their needs/preferences. Like endless rounds of Broken Telephone with death on the line.
I’m gonna go with #3. Puppies are inherently cute.
What about:
4)* Bush was given the relevant information, but just didn’t understand it.
After 9ish years of hearing him speak, I really don’t think he has the capability to grasp any complex concepts. Anything not conforming to his world view doesn’t penetrate his skull.
It’s like, I teach high school Geometry. And I tell my kids that, no matter how much the angles look congruent, you cannot ASSUME they’re congruent. But for some, no matter how much they hear it, if the angles look the same, they’ve gotta be the same.
If Iran’s part of the Axis of Evil, then they’ve gotta be doin’ somethin’ bad.
*because you already have two 3)s
I’d have to go with 1 or 2. Bush was awfully quick to shift rhetoric to a pro-him version just after the NIE came out. That, to my mind, rules out #4—you’d think he’d be rattled after learning that he’d been lying through his teeth.
3 is just possible, if he’s been governing as a sort of meat vocoder for the last seven years. It’s possible that with a clicker and an assortment of Bush-treats that they’ve successfully trained him to read anything that appears on a teleprompter. If this is the case, we should try to pull a Young Frankenstein and get him to sing “Putting on the Ritz” before his term is up.
My money is on 1. 2 requires that the administration believe in the existence of objective reality, which is a bit of a stretch. 1 just requires that the information came in and was instantly rejected because it didn’t conform to “the world as it exists in the administration’s worldview,” which the Bush administration seems to believe is much more real, in every important respect, than the actual world.
i think its a combo of 1 and 2, basically he saw it, understood it, and said fuck you america, i’m invading iran. as much as the man is a dumbass, he’d know about this shit. “bin laden determined to strike in us”? not so much.
also, just found your site yesterday after reading you awhile back on livejournal. good to be reading you again.
I’d say 1. He looked at it, said, “Well, the NIE’s been wrong before, and these guys are probably gunshy about giving me information that might cause a war, because they got blasted for that on Iraq, so they’re probably being soft on the whole thing. Better to assume the worst, because they’re Iran, and they’re capable of _anything_.”
Which actually sounds like it could be reasonable when you put it like that, but let’s face it, this is Bush. He’s not just wrong, he’s consistently wrong.
Puppies are pretty distracting. I mean maybe he just discovered Cute Overload?
How about #6.
Bush took all the paper from the report and decided to draw on them with crayons instead.