So there I was watching Hardball--waiting for last night's Daily Show to be re-run--and in between Tweety's usual foaming at the mouth over all things Clinton, and the expected drivel about Bush's embattled approval ratings, I hear something new--and I couldn't believe my ears.
Tweety starts talking about how he recently heard--off the record, from whatever unimpeachable anonymous source of his--that Cheney was dead set on invading Iraq, before 9/11, first thing when he got into the White House--and then Bob Shrum and Pat Buchanan both start chiming in! More cognitive dissonance below the fold...
Now, this isn't news to me at all, but where was Hardball back in 2002-2003, when they could have
done something about it? Note that I am specifically critiquing Chris Matthews and
Hardball's pre-war 'reporting'--I'll give
Pat Buchanan credit, he at least has personally talked about these issues before.
So Bob Shrum and Pat Buchannan start talking about how it's no surprise that Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted to invade Iraq, seeing as how Cheney wanted to conquer the place back in 1991. And Rumsfeld signed the PNAC letter to Clinton in 1998!
All very true, but it's a little late to mention it all now! It's something you could have mentioned to us before the war started! If I was writing about this stuff back in 2003, surely you could have mentioned it? A little, maybe? Heck, Monty Python could have given us better coverage! Heck of a job, Tweety!
Update: Here's the transcript:
MATTHEWS: It also was a problem with that. I like to get into that same sort of anthem, second term, second rate staff, because you get the deputies instead of the previous principals. But it wasn‘t the deputies that got us into the war in Iraq, that advised the president it was smart for the United States to take our army into the country of Iraq and try to run the country with all the three groups fighting each other.
Let me ask you this, isn‘t that the problem right now? What Bob said, the ideology that was alien to the president when he came to office, he discovered it when he got in the White House and bought it, that we should go into Iraq?
BUCHANAN: You‘re exactly right. I mean, 9/11, the president seems to—first he did Afghanistan, then he bought into the whole thing, the democracy agenda, launching the war on Iraq, and the four people who are key here, Rumsfeld, Rice, the president and Cheney are all there.
Now, Shrum is right about the neocons, although some of them have quietly moved on, but the president has become—it‘s the zeal of the convert. He is still with the program, he‘s still with democracy, he gave a speech in India, I think where he mentioned it 16 times. So he still—
MATTHEWS: Let me not let one guy off the hook here, that‘s Cheney, Bob. I talked to someone last night who knows better about this than anybody off the record who told me the first thing Cheney wanted when he got the vice-presidency, during the transition of 2000, what he wanted was not a briefing on the world, all he wanted to know about, where do we stand in Iraq?
He was keyed on that decision from day one, long before 9/11, and it certainly looks like these guys weren‘t surprised by the decision to go to Iraq. They had it in their mind ahead of time.
SHRUM: I think Cheney was dissatisfied in 1991, when the first President Bush, at the advice of Colin Powell, wisely made the decision not to go on and capture Baghdad and occupy that country. I think 9/11, the almost instant answer of Rumsfeld and Cheney was we have to do something about Iraq and they then had the president do something, or the president himself did something, that was a disaster. He told us there were weapons of mass destruction when there weren‘t.
Since then, time after time after time, he‘s been caught shading the truth or not telling the truth.
BUCHANAN: Rumsfeld was for an invasion of Iraq in '98 and in the PNAC letter they sent to Bill Clinton. Invade Iraq and we will back you up. Kristol and the whole gang.
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: Those ideologues are sort of out of power right now.