This pisses me off.
Yesterday, on All Things Considered, David Brooks slimed Joe Wilson with GOP talking point about Wilson claiming Cheney sent him to Niger. And, as Brook notes, Cheney did no such thing.
Below is why this is all a LIE.
Here is the transcript from
Media Matters.
From the July 14 broadcast of NPR's All Things Considered:
ROBERT SIEGEL (host): David Brooks, is President Bush standing by his closest adviser, or is the absence of a vigorous presidential defense of Karl Rove more noteworthy, despite every other Republican offering a vigorous defense of Karl Rove?
BROOKS: Yeah, I think the president is not inclined to leap into this thing when we know so little and when the investigation's still ongoing. It would stun me if George Bush would walk away from Karl Rove. It would take a lot to pry that guy away from the other guy.
And I must say, you know, I'm not one of these people who really understands Rove-aphobia, the idea that Karl Rove is the dark genius at the center of the universe. And I must say, the frenzy that's going on around us all week; I still don't know that there's a crime or anything particularly wrong going on here. Joe Wilson was going around saying that the vice president sent him to Iraq, which turns out to be untrue. And [Time magazine reporter] Matt Cooper, from what we know of his memo, was looking into that story, and Rove said, "No, it wasn't the vice president who sent him; his wife's a CIA agent."
Of course this is a lie. Again, the invaluable Media Matters provides the relevant CNN transcript.
From the August 3, 2003, edition of CNN's Late Edition:
WILSON: Well, look, it's absolutely true that neither the vice president nor Dr. [then-national security adviser Condoleezza] Rice nor even [then-CIA Director] George Tenet knew that I was traveling to Niger.
What they did, what the office of the vice president did, and, in fact, I believe now from Mr. Libby's statement, it was probably the vice president himself --
BLITZER: [I. Lewis] "Scooter" Libby is the chief of staff for the vice president.
WILSON: Scooter Libby. They asked essentially that we follow up on this report -- that the agency follow up on the report. So it was a question that went to the CIA briefer from the Office of the Vice President. The CIA, at the operational level, made a determination that the best way to answer this serious question was to send somebody out there who knew something about both the uranium business and those Niger officials that were in office at the time these reported documents were executed.
Tonight Brooks repeated the same lie on the News Hour.
Two points:
What will the New York Times do about this?
Why wasn't Mark Shields ready for this?