Iraq

 As CNN’s Fareed Zakaria concluded his Fareed Zakaria GPS show on Sunday, he recommended to his audience that they read former President George W. Bush’s memoir, Decision Points, but, even while recommending the book, he still took a dig at the former President as he described the book as "surprisingly well written." He also acknowledged that "you might not think he’s super-smart" before praising the former President as "agreeable" and "frank."

Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Sunday, February 13, Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN:

Most of the media were predictably jubilant and giddy on Friday when it was announced that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was stepping down.

Acting as the voice of reason was syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer who on PBS's "Inside Washington" spoke some inconvenient truths about the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt's similarities to pre-Islamic Revolution Iran that America's press have been dishonestly downplaying for weeks (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Chris Matthews on Friday said that Hosni Mubarak's exit from Egypt and the jubilation now happening in Tahrir Square took Barack Obama to have happen.

As soon as he said it on the 5 p.m. installment of MSNBC's "Hardball," the host quipped, "His critics will probably say, 'Yeah, we knew this was coming'” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Good Morning America's George Stephanopoulos on Tuesday repeatedly hectored Donald Rumsfeld, goading the former Defense Secretary to apologize for not supporting a troop surge in Iraq. At no point did the former Democratic operative admit that some in the media, including reporters at ABC, were skeptical of such a surge.

Stephanopoulos chided, "So, can you now concede what Senator McCain said last week was correct? That had you stayed in office, there would have been defeat in Iraq and the surge would not have taken place?" Stephanopoulos asserted that individuals such as then-ambassador to Iraq Paul Bremer called for a surge. The host argued, "It's documented in Bob Woodward's book." Rumsfeld retorted, "Bob Woodward wasn't there."

On January 10 2007, then-GMA host Diane Sawyer lectured White House aide Dan Bartlett about the surge: "I just want to run through a partial roll call of the number of people who have either opposed what the President is going to do, or expressed serious reservations." After reading off several names, she complained, "What don’t they get? What don’t they understand?"

Newsweek's Eleanor Clift must have felt like a fish out of water during the taping of this weekend's syndicated "McLaughlin Group."

In a lengthy and tremendously informative segment about the crisis in Egypt, the host and his other three guests - Pat Buchanan, Monica Crowley, and Mort Zuckerman - gave the perilously liberal columnist quite a lesson regarding the Obama administration's diplomatic mishandling of Hosni Mubarak as well insights about the Muslim Brotherhood that most in the media are ignoring (video follows with transcript and commentary):

There was some fascinating historical revisionism that took place on Friday's "Inside Washington" as almost the entire panel made the case that Democrats were largely opposed to the Iraq War Resolution in October 2002 and that the decision to invade was mostly George W. Bush's.

This included PBS's Mark Shields who completely misrepresented the historic vote in the Senate that month (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Having mercilessly attacked Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) for six days in a row, MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Wednesday set his sights on conservative talk show host Glenn Beck.

After an opening teaser in which the "Hardball" host referred to "the right-wing freak-out over Egypt," Matthews ended up doing two segments about the Fox News star in which he and his perilously liberal guests called the object of their disaffection a "fear mongering," "completely crazy," "full mooner," "Captain Queeg" (videos follow with partial transcripts and lengthy commentary):

Chris Matthews on Friday asked the panelists on the syndicated program bearing his name two questions about the crisis in Egypt that must have made his liberal viewers gasp.

Moments after surprisingly asking NBC's Andrea Mitchell if "neo-conservatives who believe in really trying to push democracy" were right all along, Matthews asked David Sanger of the New York Times if George W. Bush was "better equipped than this President to deal with this crisis" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

It's a metaphysical certitude that whenever anything happens in the Middle East, the media will quickly blame former President George W. Bush and the war in Iraq.

Not missing the opportunity to do so, Chris Matthews began the 5PM installment of "Hardball" Friday connecting the riots in Egypt to a man that has been out of office for two years (video follows with transcript and commentary):

 On Friday’s Countdown show on MSNBC, host Keith Olbermann announced that the episode would be his last, and spent a few minutes near the end of the show saying goodbye. He mentioned a number of infamous and pivotal points in his show’s history when he went after the Bush administration:

The show gradually established its position as anti-establishment from the stagecraft of "Mission Accomplished," to the exaggerated rescue of Jessica Lynch in Iraq, to the death of Pat Tillman to Hurricane Katrina, to the "Nexus of Politics and Terror," to the first "Special Comment."

As he listed a number of prominent supporters of his show, he ended up notably giving credit to the late Tim Russert of NBC for being "my greatest protector, and most indefatigable cheerleader."

Below the fold is the video and a complete transcript of Olbermann's announcement from the Friday, January 21, Countdown show on MSNBC, from about 8:53 p.m.:

Just when Joe-mentum was building for Lieberman-Huffington '12!

Say this for Arianna Huffington: she didn't stab Joe Lieberman in the back.  On Morning Joe today, the HuffPo founder went for the full frontal assault, telling the outgoing senator to his face "I sincerely hope for the sake of the country that you do not become Secretary of Defense."

Lieberman was not defenseless, at one point condescendingly spelling out for Arianna's sake the name of the author of a report he relied on to conclude Saddam was developing WMD.  When Arianna huffed that the report proved nothing, Lieberman sniped "I don't think you've read it, sweetheart."

View video of the dust-up after the jump.

Two paragraphs don't seem to belong together in Martin Crutsinger's Associated Press dispatch on the government's Monthly Treasury Statement for December. But there they are.

Here's the first paragraph of interest in Martin's missive ("Federal budget deficit narrows to $80B in December"):

Government spending during this period totaled $902.6 billion, an increase of 3.1 percent over the same period a year ago.

Now watch Crutsinger tell readers why spending should be down, perhaps without even realizing it (bold is mine):

The New York Times ran a rather serious report on Tuesday, regarding former Vice-President Dick Cheney and the new mechanical heart pump he received in July.  The addition of the new pump means that Cheney’s heart will never again beat at full strength, and leaves him with a daunting decision whether or not to have a full heart transplant.

Naturally, juveniles in the liberal media have had a blast with the news.

Political Wire, a supposedly non-partisan political blog led off a post about the heart transplant with this gem:

The New York Times confirms what many of his political opponents always assumed: Dick Cheney has no pulse.

And there’s more...

Jeffrey Sachs has attacked distinguished military historian Victor Davis Hanson as an "extremist" who "has done more harm to the American people" than any other commentator.

Sachs, a Columbia prof and income redistributionist supreme, launched his surprising verbal assault in commenting on Hanson's National Review Online column, "The Obamites' About-Face."  Hanson there makes the case that out of political pragmatism, Obama has flip-flopped on everything from "the environment, radical Islam, taxes, stimulus, the economy, national security" to foreign policy.

View video after the jump.

Could Michael Kinsley possibly be any more predictable?  His review of George Bush's "Decision Points," appearing in today's Sunday New York Times, is precisely the smug piece of sneering partisanship you would expect in this paper and from this quintessential liberal MSM elitist.

As the headline indicates, Kinsley flatly accuses W of "stealing" the 2000 election.  Kinsley offers no proof, but surely most of the people who will read this review require none.  They take it as a matter of deep partisan faith.  Speaking of faith, the former Crossfire man is mocking of Bush's.  Consider this excerpt:

"[H]e stopped drinking with the help of God, who spoke to him while he was out jogging. (I make light, but this part of his story is actually fascinating, gutsy and very well told.) Thirteen years later, after he had made a quick fortune buying and selling a baseball team and then had been elected governor of Texas, God told him to run for president."

If Kinsley admired Bush's telling of how his faith helped him to stop drinking, why then would he "make light"?  Could it be that he needs to remind his audience and himself that they are way too sophisticated to take this religion stuff seriously?

On December 3, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave CBS's Katie Couric a much-needed lesson on why America invaded Iraq.

When Couric said to her guest during an "HBO History Makers Series" interview, "Documentaries have been made about how intelligence was incorrectly analyzed and cherry-picked to build an argument for war, and memos from that time do suggest that officials knew there was a small chance of actually finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," Rice stopped the host dead in her tracks (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Syndicated columnist and PBS regular Mark Shields on Friday actually said on national television that he has never heard a Democratic leader or presidential candidate accuse former President George W. Bush of lying America into the Iraq War.

This was said in response to Charles Krauthammer telling his fellow "Inside Washington" panelists that this all too common media assertion is the "essential untruth of this decade" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

While most of the country took a collective gasp over the verdict in the trial of al-Qaeda terrorist Ahmed Ghailani, Cenk Uygur spun the disconcerting outcome as a success story for the Obama administration.

Anchoring the 3:00 P.M. EDT hour of MSNBC's live news coverage today, the liberal host of "The Young Turks" boldly and bizarrely proclaimed "our justice system worked."

After accusing congressional Republicans of being "scared of terrorists," implying that terrorists who want to kill us aren't worth fussing over, Uygur dismissed the notion that acquitting Ghailani on more than 280 charges exposed the shortcomings of trying suspected terrorists in civilian courts.

"So what?" bellowed an incredulous Uygur. "We just gave this guy, who we believe helped to kill 224 people, a fair trial."

[Video embedded after the break.]

Not to worry, Baghdad Bob, MSNBC's got your back.

Criticizing former president George W. Bush's newly released memoir, "Decision Points," Maddow said this on her cable show Monday night (video below page break)  --

  Since Republicans won control of the House of Representatives last week, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann has recited at the end of his Countdown show a new sign-off each night he has hosted noting the number of days since the GOP victory and mocking Speaker-designate John Boehner by sarcastically asking, "Where are the jobs?" At the end of Wednesday’s Countdown, he ended the show: "That's November 10th, seven days since the Republicans took control of the House. Mr. Boehner, where are the jobs? I'm Keith Olbermann. Good night and good luck."

 Back in February 2006, Olbermann began mocking President Bush by ending his show with the number of days since Bush’s speech on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln declaring an end to major combat operations in Iraq - referred to by Olbermann as declaring "mission accomplished." Last May, after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill had lasted more than a month, the MSNBC host temporarily stopped referring to "mission accomplished" in Iraq as he turned his attention to the number of days since the oil spill occurred, but he soon brought back the reference to Iraq and added Afghanistan into the mix. Wednesday, October 20, was the last day Olbermann used this version of the sign off:

That’s October 20th. It’s the 2,729th day since President Bush declared mission accomplished in Iraq, the 2,318th day since he declared victory in Afghanistan, and the 184th day of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf. I’m Keith Olbermann, leave a message after the beep. Good night and good luck.

The director of the new film "Fair Game" - released Friday - is either blatantly dishonest, or astoundingly lazy. The movie, starring Sean Penn as former U.S. diplomat Joe Wilson and Naomi Watts as his embattled wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame, makes a number of claims on controversial issues that are demonstrably false.

The Daily Caller's Jamie Weinstein did the legwork in demonstrating just how far from the truth some of the film's central claims are. Chief among them, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, and other White House officials exerted political pressure on intelligence officials to cherrypick intelligence favorable to claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Chris Matthews' renewed attacks on George W. Bush continued Tuesday as he accused the former President of having no real motive to go to war with Iraq in March 2003.

Implying that Bush was basically an idiot that was "in over his head," the "Hardball" host stated, "Maybe you ought to put this guy in a lie detector" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

A former advisor to George W. Bush smacked down Salon's Joan Walsh Monday for questioning the 43rd President's psychological compass.

Appearing on MSNBC's "Hardball," GOP strategist Ron Christie also gave Chris Matthews a much-needed education on why going into Iraq was a successful part of Bush's strategy to prevent America from a follow-up attack after 9/11 (video follows with transcript and commentary):

 On Sunday’s syndicated Chris Matthews Show, panel member Katty Kay of the BBC claimed that Vice President Dick Cheney had convinced 70 percent of Americans to believe that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks, and that he "hoodwinked the American public." Kay’s accusation came as host Matthews had turned the discussion to the topic of how President Obama might have handled the response to the 9/11 attacks differently than President Bush.

Bob Woodward of the Washington Post asserted that "there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq until we invaded, and then they came." But, as previously documented by NewsBusters, before the 2003 invasion, varous news sources - some American, some from other countries - were already citing the governments of several countries as they reported that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq, not only was already in Iraq plotting attacks against targets in Europe, but that he already had an association with Osama bin Laden and had spent time in Afghanistan.

Kay then chimed in, as she suggested that Cheney had convinced most Americans that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks, although she seemed to mistakenly use the word "Iraq" instead of "9/11." Kay: "But the, sort of, political ‘extraordinaryness’ of the Bush administration was that Cheney managed to convince 70 percent of American people that Iraq was, that Saddam Hussein was directly behind Iraq and hoodwinked the American public."

Matthews responded: "In the polling, you’re right, it’s in the polling."

Former president George W. Bush can’t even put exhibits in his own presidential center without offending some easily frightened leftists. New York Times reporter Michael Brick handed some at Southern Methodist University in Dallas a megaphone to complain about the megaphone Bush used to address rescue workers from the rubble of the World Trade Center in moving fashion three days after the attacks in “Opening of Exhibit on Bush Reopens a Campus Rift.” Let's pick things up at paragraph three:

But now Mr. Bush is bringing out the bullhorn.

“Breaking New Ground: Presenting the George W. Bush Presidential Center,” an exhibit set to open this weekend on the campus of Southern Methodist University, prominently features the handgun taken from Saddam Hussein and the loudspeaker used to address rescue workers at the World Trade Center in September 2001.

The choice of mementos, emphasizing some of the more controversial foreign policy aspects of the Bush presidency, has reinvigorated opposition to the center’s presence at the university.

“It’s the approach they’ve taken all along; it fits their worldview,” said the Rev. William K. McElvaney, a professor emeritus of preaching and worship at the university. “It’s a tragedy for S.M.U. to hitch its star to this.”
....

The new opening exhibit, some Methodist leaders said, provides a disturbing first glimpse into the presidential center’s priorities.

Not that it justifies the horrible consequences of leaking classifed information, thereby endangering our troops, our allies, our friends, and their families (of course it doesn't), but the WikiLeaked documents being carried at outlets like the New York Times are revealing some truths that are proving quite inconvenient for Iraq war opponents.

Earlier today (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I noted that a post at one of Wired.com's blogs ("WikiLeaks Show WMD Hunt Continued in Iraq – With Surprising Results") rnoted that "for years afterward, WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins, and uncover weapons of mass destruction." Add that to the already large pile of evidence that totally debunks the leftist folklore that "there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."

Now Andrew Bolt at Melbourne, Australia's Herald-Sun (HT Instapundit) tells us that another leftist myth about the war's impact on Iraq's general populace is getting retired to the ash heap of false history (links are in original):

The WikiLeaksters seem to have inadvertently done history a bit of a favor in the their obsession, with the help of heavy-breathing media mouthpieces like the New York Times, to release classified military documents.

It seems that some of those documents reveal the utter untruthfulness of a core claim of Iraq War opponents, namely that "We now know that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."

This contention, not nuanced in any way (i.e., not "no stockpiles" or "not that many," but instead absolutely none), is part of leftist folklore. Here are just a few example of so-called "mainstream" or "respected" liberal sources found to have made that exact contention in a brief Internet searches this morning: