WaPo's David Ignatius: Bush's Iran Intel Lie Is A "Non-Story"
December 10, 2007 -- 10:31 AM EST // //
For those of you who get a kind of perverse kick out of seeing D.C. punditry at its most vacuous and borderline-corrupt, The Washington Post's David Ignatius really delivered with a one-two punch of pundit buffoonery yesterday.
First he devoted all of yesterday's column to -- yawn -- the notion that Bill Clinton is a liability to Hillary's candidacy. He actually outdid other pundits, though, arguing that Bill is an issue that won't go away until Hillary addresses it. This "issue," of course, has never been here at all -- multiple polls show that large majorities either view Bill as a non-issue or as a positive. Wouldn't it be much simpler, if Ignatius would just say that he, and not the public, has issues with Bill returning to the White House?
But now on to the worse part. Ignatius also went on Chris Matthews' show yesterday and gamely tried to explain away the fact that Bush misled the nation last week about when he'd heard about the new intel suggesting Iran may have shuttered its nuke program. Via Nexis:
MATTHEWS: Had you--had you gotten the word in August as a reporter that there was going to be a big change in our assessment of the nuclear threat from Iran downward, there was going to be less of threat estimate, what would you have asked as a follow-up ?This is pure shillery. Ignatius is completely misstating the crux of what happened last week. The issue isn't whether intel officials told Bush that they needed to solidify their intel; they did. Rather, it's that Bush said last week that he hadn't been briefed until very recently on the general thrust of the intel -- which was that Iran might have shuttered its nuke program -- when in fact he had been briefed about it much earlier, as his press secretary subsequently admitted.Mr. IGNATIUS: Well, you know, I would have wanted the--to let the analysts finish the job. I mean, I think in some ways this is a non-story. They come to Bush, they say, `Mr. President, we've got some startling new intelligence. We're trying to figure out what it means. We'll try to figure out whether it might be a deliberate attempt to deceive us, so let us work on this,' and the president says, `OK, go finish up.'
Hmmm. To me it seems like a story that the same President who misled the nation into a war once already by hyping a non-threat was again caught dissembling on what he knew and when about another nuke threat. But to Ignatius it's just a big yawner -- a "non-story."
It gets worse. Later in the same exchange, he tells us that contrary to what many suspect, he knows that the White House actually wanted to share the new Iran intel with the public. "My sources tell me that quite the opposite, the White House said, as this thing was being finished, `You've got to put it out,'" he told Matthews.
We are never told who these "sources" are or even what their affiliation is. So maybe we shouldn't be taking what these "sources" say all that seriously. After all, we already know that Veep Cheney was actively working behind the scenes to discredit the intel. And over the weekend, Ignatius' own paper quoted a top intelligence official saying that the info was pushed out because officials "knew it would leak."
All this nonsense in one day -- Bill's a liability to Hillary, and Bush's dissembling about another nuke threat is a "non-story" because Ignatius' "sources" tell him so. Ignatius just didn't live through the same last decade as the rest of us did, apparently.
Comments section temporarily disabled. To reach the homepage of this blog, click here.