Speaking Truth For Power

Kidding?  Tom Friedman waxes about Anderson Cooper (video), who bravely rose to defend the honor (and thrift!) of Barack's White House when talk radio lit up with the bogus report that the President's trip to India was costing $200 million a day.

That's speaking up for the powerless, all right.

Meanwhile, I am having utter brain lock here.  If folks could help me out with comparable lefty folk tales that neither Tom Friedman, Anderson Cooper nor anyone on the left attempted to refudiate, that would be great.  From an eternity ago I have in my mind an absurdly phony "study" which proved that abortions rose under George Bush.  Lefties lapped it up, natch, and where was Anderson Cooper then?

More recent examples would be helpful.  As would some ginkgo biloba.

Comments

[Clarice]

Blood for oil
Anything about Plame
Bush Lied
Cheney profited off Halliburton while VP
Bush wanted to kill off black people in NO.
Rove was about to be indicted.
(I can stop anytime)

[Rick Ballard]

If we're looking for phony studies, then the Lancet casualty crap would rank very high.

[MarkO]

What about the lie that Obama was smart?

[Porchlight]

Is that two posts in one day where TM uses "refudiate"?

Love it.

[matt]

So Cooper refudiated the number published by a 3rd rate Indian newsrag? Why, he deserves a Profile in Courage!

As the flag of Leftism becomes more and more tattered, its acolytes must prove themselves in ever more quixotic jousts with paper tigers.

Friedman and Cooper together provide the world with the intellectual curiosity and meaning of a ham sandwich.

[Danube of Thought]

Wife-beating increases dramatically on Super Bowl Sunday.

[RichatUF]

The cost of the Bush inaugural ball. His travel to Crawford (that was a retort because of Obama's date night to NYC, another data point for Mr. Last?).

How about the trip where Bush traveled with "a small private army and private air force" (I think that one was when he went to South America, but my google skillz are failing)?

[Danube of Thought]

Bush I flew to Paris in an SR 71 to get the Iranians to hold off releasing the hostages until after Reagan was sworn in.

[daddy]

TM,

Alar Apples
Foodlion expose'
NBC's Exploding Fuel Tanks
Palin can see Russia from her couch
Hillary's Cattle Futures
Monica-Gate
Plame's blown cover killed agents in the field
"Sexed up" WMD reports
ClimateGate e-mails
There will be No Death Panels
Melting Himalayan Glaciers by 2035
Crowd size of DC TeaPartiers
voters were angry because Obama didn't explain his programs well enough
"violent Teapartier's" versus benevolent SEIU thugs
non-existent Racist slurs hurled at Black Congressmen
Harry Reid's "paying Taxes is voluntary not mandatory"
Islam is the Religion of Peace
and the Main Stream Media is unbiased.

[Captain Hate]

So Flathead and Cooper are speaking troof to in support of power? How edgy..

[PD]

So, um. How much *did* the trip cost?

[bgates]

There was a Times editorial in 2009 that said the deficit would rise because Obama had eliminated "accounting gimmicks that President George W Bush used", including the practice of supplemental appropriations during the year. Obama described that as Bush's "casual dishonesty of hiding irresponsible spending with clever accounting tricks."

By April, Obama was making the claim that "the $3.55 trillion budget proposal for 2010 will be noticeably larger than the budget request for 2009 [which was $3.11 trillion] because the Obama administration has included the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. During the Bush administration, these expenses were set forth in a separate supplemental request."

In fact, the Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2009 provided $106B for fiscal year 2009 to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's less than a quarter of the amount that Obama said it was.

Which brings us to the current editorial, where Friedman says, Cooper also pointed out that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the entire war effort in Afghanistan was costing about $190 million a day - that's $70B for the year. Iraq could be costing twice that much, and the war costs would still be half as much - $200,000,000,000 less than - the amount that Obama said they were a year ago.

By demonstrating that Obama is not spending $200M a day for two weeks in India, Cooper inadvertently demonstrated that Obama lied in blaming at least $200B, or $550M a day for the whole year, on war spending.

[Ranger]

BTW, Warren Buffet is going to be awarded the Medal of Freedom for convincing everyone that Obama was really pro-private sector before the 2008 election. Speaking "truth" for power indeed.

[PD]

And is there the slightest concern on the left over the immense scope of the entourage, the number of rooms rented, the whole hugely overblown fabulousness of this trip when nearly 10% of the work force is out of work and people are struggling to pay their bills, much less the bill for President Wonderful?

[Elliott]

Is that two posts in one day where TM uses "refudiate"?

Yikes, I've heard bad things about speed refudiating.

[Charlie (Colorado)]

Is that two posts in one day where TM uses "refudiate"?

Word of the Year.

[Phlegmatic Phact Checks]

The un-funded Bush war-of-choice paid for itself.

Spent & Approved War-Spending - About $900 billion of US taxpayers' funds spent or approved for spending through Sept 2010.

Lost & Unaccounted for in Iraq - $9 billion of US taxpayers' money and $549.7 milion in spare parts shipped in 2004 to US contractors. Also, per ABC News, 190,000 guns, including 110,000 AK-47 rifles.

Missing - $1 billion in tractor trailers, tank recovery vehicles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and other equipment and services provided to the Iraqi security forces. (Per CBS News on Dec 6, 2007.)

Mismanaged & Wasted in Iraq - $10 billion, per Feb 2007 Congressional hearings

Halliburton Overcharges Classified by the Pentagon as Unreasonable and Unsupported - $1.4 billion

Amount paid to KBR, a former Halliburton division, to supply U.S. military in Iraq with food, fuel, housing and other items - $20 billion.

http://usliberals.about.com/od/homelandsecurit1/a/IraqNumbers.htm

[daddy]

Did I mention the meme of "The Religion Of Peace?"

Can't make this stuff up. From The AP:

"Police say a shootout inside a mosque in southwestern Pakistan has wounded 18 people during one of Islam's most important holidays. The clash came after a dispute over which of two rival clerics should lead prayers. Police official Javed Ahmed says followers of the two local religious leaders pulled out weapons and started shooting on Wednesday morning at a mosque in Khuzdar district of Baluchistan province."

http://www.news24.com/World/News/18-hurt-in-Pakistan-mosque-argument-20101117

[Danube of Thought]

Great--embassy bombing guy acquitted on all but one count.

Heckuva job, Eric.

[Danube of Thought]

"The un-funded Bush war-of-choice paid for itself."

At least it cost less than the unfunded stimulus, and unlike the stimulus it didn't fail.

[MoodyBlu]

Ranger:
BTW, Warren Buffet is going to be awarded the Medal of Freedom for convincing everyone that Obama was really pro-private sector before the 2008 election. Speaking "truth" for power indeed

The one that makes me gack is John Sweeney. Medal of Freedom for someone who would enslave if able.

[Strawman Cometh]

10% of the work force is out of work.

PD, that's just the "unemployment rate". The non-employment rate is way higher, astronomical when you add in the under-employed.

[Extraneus]

So the "truth" is that the WH says it wasn't $200M per day, and they're not telling what it really was?

Gutsy. You go, Anderson.

[RichatUF]

He'll never let go of that bone DoT. Cut and paste job from about.com.

[RichatUF]

Ex-

Presidential trips cost money, quite a bit when security is added. If Obama wasn't so profligate and the trip being such a colossal failure the story would never have been picked up by the US media. It was probably a garbaled translation anyway. Obama should have just hit the links and not embarrassed the country.

[BobDenver]

Just read the Times Magazine article about Sarah Palin.

My first reaction: how the hell did Pinch let this get printed?

You know, she might just be able to win in 2012.

[Janet the tea-vangelist!]

So the "truth" is that the WH says it wasn't $200M per day, and they're not telling what it really was?

Yeah Extraneus. Do the media not see that?

Another little example - Bush & the "plastic" turkey.

[Janet the tea-vangelist!]

Man-made global warming.

[Jim Ryan]

Bob Denver, can you give us a little report about the article?

[BobDenver]

Yes, Jim. The author interviewed Palin and her various advisors, who are scattered all over the country and who avoid personal aggrandisement like the plague. Sarah is painted as very sensitive to being used or betrayed by those she works with, and the McCain campaign is cited as complete justification for this sensitivity. A lot of time is spent discussing her endorsements and looking for the key to the pattern (and there really isn't an overriding theme). An explanation is given for Palin's unavailability for campaign events just before the election: Trig was scheduled for a surgery. It is made clear that almost all, if not all, of her Twitter and Facebook stuff is hers and hers alone. Robert Gibbs is profiled as a guy who can't BELIEVE the press is forcing him to respond to her attacks on the administration. Palin comes across as smart, quick, endlessly energetic and sympathetic, and she is pounding the briefing books like nobody's business. She's asked about the reports of Republican Beltway types looking to kneecap her, and she goes Tea Party on them.

There's mention of an event where she and Rove both attended; Rove came up to her carrying a copy of "Alaska for Dummies," and she laughed and took his picture, and they parted without substantive conversation.

Organization is going to be a problem. Her advisors have no titles, no structure, no assigned areas, and there are few of them. And she is suspicious of professional advisors. Her speechwriter is a Hollywood scriptwriter. And she has to personally approve anything that they do, including talking to the press. And, no surprise, Todd is THE key advisor, and the only one she completely trusts.

[PD]

PD, that's just the "unemployment rate". The non-employment rate is way higher, astronomical when you add in the under-employed.

In the new spirit of bipartisanship, I was being charitable.

[PD]

Aha! We have irrefudiatable evidence that GWB is a dummy, from his own hand! At least if it wasn't ghostwritten!

From "Decision Points" acknowledgments, p479:

I am fortunate to come from a family of bestselling authors. My mother and father wrote fine books, as did my sister Doro. Closer to home, Laura wrote a bestseller, Jenna wrote a bestseller, and they collaborated on another. Even my parents' dogs, C. Fred and Millie, authored their own books.

What a maroon! He thinks dogs can write!!!

/me considers visting PuffHo to see whether someone there actually believes that line of reasoning.

[PD]

Also from the acknowledgments, and this will surprise none of us:

Finally, I think the men and women of the United States military. While I dedicated this book to Laura, Barbara, and Jenna, nobody did more to inspire me than those who wear the uniform of this country and their families. Their achievements will rank alongside those of the greatest generations in history, and the highest honor of my life was to serve as their commander in chief.

[Porchlight]

Very nice summary, BobDenver. Thanks.

[Stephanie]

#1 on my daughter's list for Christmas

Decision Points.

I'm so proud!

[PD]

The president's view of Wall Street:

For most of my time at Harvard, I had no idea how I was going to use my ... degree. I knew what I did not want to do. I had no desire to go to Wall Street. While I knew decent and admirable people who had worked on Wall Street ... I was suspicious of the financial industry. I used to tell friends that Wall Street is the kind of place where they will buy you or sell you, but they don't really give a hoot about you so long as they can make money off you.

Which president, you say? That's from "Decision Points," p23.

[narciso]

A very laudatory profile coming from someone who around two years ago, was just
transcribing the complaints of McCain's staff, it really does capture her ethos, if such a thing is possible in a SRM publication, This is a guerilla campaign, dare I say it like the Wolverines of Red Dawn, which also doubles as Clarice and my
alma mater's college and high school, mascots, that Malek should recall from his Green Beret training so long ago, Ferraro from the vantage point of a 49 state wipeout, deigns to condescend to her, about the brilliant election strategy of '84 vis a vis the 2008 campaign. Well no deed goes unpunished considering the due recognition
the latter had given as a trailblazer

[DrJ]

I'm pretty sure Clarice is a Badger, as far as school affiliations go.

[Clarice]

Correct-So's Caro.

[DrJ]

Thought so. We Wolverines are sensitive to this Big Ten nonsense. Go Bears!

[Clarice]

My grand daughter is nicknamed the wolverine because a friend of her parents spotted her when she was really young , took note of her strong spirit and called her that.

[bunkerbuster]

The evidence that Bush lied about the Iraq war is overwhelming and incontrovertible.
The crucial lie was his claim to be "certain" that Iraq had WMD at the time he called for the invasion.
At great cost of lives and treasure, our own military and intelligence established beyond any reasonable doubt that Iraq did not have WMD. Bush's claim to be "certain" they existed is therefore incontrovertibly false.
Moreover, Bush directed his underlings such as Gen. Powell to make even more specific claims, such as the assertion that we even knew where the WMD were. Cheney spread the lie widely, deploying the Kissinger formulation of "If you could see the evidence that we've seen, you'd agree that the invasion is necessary.'' (A subsidiary lie is that Saddam was somehow involved in 9/11 -- a ludicrous assertion that, thanks to Fox, talkradio and the wingnutosphere, became a "fact" to a significant minority of Americans and something like 80 percent of Republicans.
Bush may well have BELIEVED Saddam had WMD, I know I did. But Bush could not have been certain, given that top intelligence professionals had widely reported their doubts about whether the WMD were there.
The Senate Select Committee Intelligence report on the war showed that the National Security Council sought new evidence of the existence of Iraqi WMD four days before Jan. 2003 Bush's SOTU in which he claimed to be "certain" that the WMD existed. Bush's own presidential commission on the war said the CIA was "uncertain" about the information Bush had used in an earlier speech to back the claim that Iraq had special aircraft for delivering chemical or biological weapons. And, as we all now know, the intelligence estimates Gen. Powell cited in public addresses in 2003 were unconfirmed, a fact that was deliberately left out and replaced with "certain" and similar verbiage.
The least-insane arguments that Bush didn't lie rely on the excuse that Bush BELIEVED the WMD existed, just as some many Democrats and others did. The record shows clearly that no intelligence professional of any description ever presented Bush with proof of WMD and, could not have done so, as none existed. When the CINC says he's certain, he cannot honestly claim that he was merely expressing a belief, ie a considered opinion.
Surely Bush weighed his words very carefully. Surely he deliberately chose to declare certainty where none could have existed and by freely making that choice, he lied to start a war.

[M Malone]

You could always mention the "truth to power" lecture that Lefties are currently having with the Illinois state government and the Democratic leadership of the US Senate for the Senate's session that includes one Sen. Roland Burris - After the citizens of Illinois voted for a different Senator from a different party to serve the period that we are going through right now.

All kidding aside, it's easy to blame the finishing school known as Northwestern but the rest of the nation's crack Lefty journalists should've at least noticed this, if for nothing else than to speak truth to power.

[Clarice]

Surely, bubu, every respectable intel agency in Europe and the Middle east believed that Saddam had WMD and would use them if invaded. Even his generals believed that. We did find some. More importantly, we found that he was in a position to rapidly re-instate his vast WMD program as soon as sanctions and inspections were lifted and as we learned, he bribed enough tranzis that that transition was just around the corner.

[PaulY]

Joe Wilson Plame wrote editorial saying US should not invade because SH had WMDs. Now we know he is a liar.

[Dave (in MA)]

If Bush was 1/10th as sinister as Bunny and his fellow moonbats keep telling each other, WMD stockpiles would have been planted when they weren't found.

[matt]

One of my favorite lines was John Belushi in his English lesson in, I believe, the 2nd episode of SNL, "I would like to purchase a wolverine".

[wmd is bio(barry) terror]

words of any good cia informants son to live by as long as they get paid.,etc
joe and val movie was shit but you can do so mich with uc arry take care of ers

[narciso]

There was 500 K of uranium at Tammuz 16, aka Osirak, at the time of the US entry into Baghdad in 2003, very much what could have been processed in the previous four years or so, Al Qua Qua, was one of the bases involved
with their long range missile program, a detail not pointed out by the Times

[JM Hanes]

I don't know about Cooper, but Friedman has certainly never asked any tough questions about the "science" behind Anthropogenic Global Warming. To my knowledge, he has never actually asked any questions about it -- or about the putative economic benefits of (other people) going green.

[JM Hanes]

Lefties like bubu love it when the subject of GWB comes up. They only seem comfortable looking backward. Evidence suggests that they can't bear to discuss Obama.

[bunkerbuster]

Clarice fantasizes: ``every respectable intel agency in Europe and the Middle east believed that Saddam had WMD and would use them if invaded.''
1. As I pointed out, investigations by the Republican-led U.S. Senate and the White House itself acknowledged that intelligence agencies, including our own, expressed doubts about the evidence. And even if some spies and analysts "believed" he had them (as I did), Bush didn't use a weasely word like "believe." He said he was certain. He dispatched his minions to claim that we ``know where they are'' and, most famously, to present the United Nations with a falsified slideshow depicting ordinary Iraqi construction sites as clandestine storage and manufacturing facilities for WMD -- a slideshow that our own intelligence agencies refused to sign off on.
Clare asserts: ``We did find some.''
"Some"??? That's pathetic. The facts are clear and undeniable: Iraq did not possess any WMD that could have or would have been given to terrorists. The fact that you insist on attempting to adulterate the well-established results of an exhaustive search for WMD is just sad.

``We found that he was in a position to rapidly re-instate his vast WMD program.''
LOL… such epistemological flexibility. It goes hand-in-hand with poor logic. The argument is over whether or not he had WMD. By asserting that the more important thing is that he could have produced some at some point in the future, you're putting a day-glo highlight onto the undeniable fact that he DIDN'T HAVE THEM. Thanks!
Not to mention: We found exactly the opposite: Saddam's regime couldn't even keep the lights on! The whole WMD fraud was his last, cornered, attempt to hold onto power by spooking Iran and/or by convincing his underlings that he had it in his power to spook Iran. The regime was consumed with merely surviving and utterly lacked the security arrangements necessary to even begin to carry off such a program without rapid detection and/or sabotage. His regime collapsed in days and, eventually, he was given up by one of this own countrymen.
Dave in MA: Even Bush was smart enough to figure out how easily any attempt to plant weapons could and would be exposed. You conveniently forget, or are ignorant, of the fact that much of the national security establishment was against Bush's war and, likewise, at odds with his fanciful descriptions of what we knew about WMD in Iraq. Especially because it would have had to have been carried out as the invasion was being conducted and beautiful American men and women were getting their heads blown off searching for the WMD. On the other hand, it is certainly at least theoretically possible that Bush and Cheney are even less connected to reality than they seemed, in which case one could wonder why they didn't try something as obviously foolhardy as planting WMD…
JM: I don't blame you one bit for not wanting to hear Bush and WMD in the same sentence. It has to be one of the saddest chapters in our entire history...

[You only convince yourself, sad sack, with your untruths.]

Meh, bb, the latest translations confirm that Saddam pretended to WMD in order to keep the Persians at bay.
===============

[narciso]

Maybe so, but where are the records of the disposed of weapons, Kim,

[Captain Hate]

It has to be one of the saddest chapters in our entire history...

It would be sad if you're fully invested in defeat, as this ambulatory colostomy bag obviously is.

[Jack is Back!]

My 2 cents:

Trig Palin = Sullivan dementia. Actually anything Palin!

Does that count?

[SaveFarris]

How have we gone this far without the big enchilada:

"Bush lost Florida"

[Charlie (Colorado)]

BB, I think you deserve congratulations. That argument -- that Bush was lying when he said he "was certain" of WMD before because, after Iraq fell, we found there were lots fewer (not "none") WMDs than we expected -- is without a doubt the stupidest, most ludicrous, most transparently wish-fulfilling argument I have ever seen promulgated, in print, digital press, television, radio, or by direct speech.

[bunkerbuster]

Thanks Charlie, for demonstrating that you don't understand the difference between "expecting" to find WMD and being "certain" they are there.
Again, Bush and his vast team pored over every word of his SOTU and other pronouncements on WMD, if they'd meant that they "expected" to find WMD, that's what they would have said. But they chose instead to say they were "certain."
So when you extricate yourself out from under that pile of redundant adjectives and adverbs, you might want to try some nouns and verbs. Of course, you'll need facts and logic for that...lol

[Melissal]

Wow....MSNBC and their flaming lib following would be demanding the execution of cons if they were in control of congress under the current state of affairs. Even 5th graders are pulling their hair out trying to figure out why the current congress and oval office is getting a free pass...

Nox Edge