Announcing a new campaign. The GOP has tried to turn debate about DSM into a circus, so I think we should play along a little.
Please join me in keeping track of the number of days the President and VP have neglected even to read the notorious minutes. I'll note the day count prominently in every one of my posts, and if others do the same we can force this DSM watch into the media. Those who remember the 1980 hostage-crisis daily count in the news will know how powerful a PR tool something this simple can be.
Once it catches on sufficiently, we can start urging people to call the WH daily to ask when Bush and Cheney will read the document(s). It is an astonishingly stupid, even pig-headed position for them to have taken. We should take every advantage of it to embarrass them. If we play this right, the DSM watch will be widely known in the public before BushCo learns of it. By that time, they may be too embarrassed to admit to giving in to public demand to read what they take pride in ignoring.
I'm very serious, this could be a key to driving this story forward all summer. It's a splendid symbol of the arrogance, stupidity, and know-nothingness of the administration.
Fifty-seven days ago the Times of London published the Downing Street Minutes. Bush cheerleaders are scurrying about looking to discredit the document by any means. They've made quite a spectacle, contradicting and undercutting each other's explanations about why nobody should pay attention to DSM.
Some say DSM is a forgery intended to embarrass Bush, others that it was forged to embarrass Blair, and others insist it's authentically banal and says nothing we didn't already know. Hmm... Some say it proves nothing because it's 3rd, 4th, 5th hand info, others insist that the minute-taker can't be trusted to get anything right, others still say it proves that the Brits believed sincerely that Hussein posed an imminent threat because of his WMD. Some claim that it represents the British rather than the American point of view, others say Dearlove got all his info from gossip at parties in DC, and yet others say it can't be trusted because maybe Dearlove thought Bush's war plans wouldn't work and thus he might have given too little credit to the state of war planning in DC.
Some say the expression `intelligence and facts fixed around the policy' [of regime change justified by terrorism and WMD] in British idiom means simply "attached", others "arranged", others "collected", others "linked", others "bolted", others "analyzed", and yet others deny it can mean anything specific. I await the day that any of them consults somebody who actually knows British idiomatic usage of the term (I do know what it means, by chance, as I've diaried before). Some claim that Bush was misled by bad intelligence or faulty analysis by the CIA. One group insists that the intel was good and there were WMD in Iraq, just as British intelligence reported to Bush. Still others deny that the Brits knew anything about what the Bush administration was doing with WMD intel.
I could go on, but I see that your head hurts.
In all this foolishness, there is one thing that stands out yet has been little remarked. The Bush cheerleaders are defending an administration that refuses to defend itself against the revelations in DSM. Both Bush and Cheney have claimed, as if they were proud of the fact, that they've never even read DSM. What are they waiting for, the world wants to know. The documents seem to depict a Bush administration that is deliberately and systematically deceiving the world about its war plans; provoking a war by attacking Iraq before asking Congress for war authority; and gaming the UN to provide a pretext for a war that is already in the works. I would think any President would want to correct that picture immediately, if it were untrue, by clearly explaining to the public how and why it was inaccurate--especially a President whose popularity has slipped to the level of Herbert Hoover's. I can't help but think that the position taken by Bush and Cheney is untenable.
That is why I suggest we all help them keep track of how long they've avoided the unpleasant chore of reading the few pages of these documents, which hundreds of thousands of Americans have taken the trouble to read. I ask you to join me in starting a DSM watch, and keeping it up until our leaders admit to having read DSM.
I believe we should point out, as we go, that Bush and Cheney are perfectly ready to deny the accuracy of the document they have not read. At his June 7th press conference with Tony Blair, George Bush did exactly that. He argued that DSM must be inaccurate because the US actually did go to the UN to request an ultimatum. (As many have pointed out, that fact proves nothing logically about the accuracy of minutes from an earlier meeting.) Cheney has followed Bush's lead, as we see in his recent interview on CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/06/23/cheney.interview/
Even those Americans who don't want to know the details regarding DSM will be able to see the foolishness of refusing to read incriminating documents, and then trying to rebut them anyway. So there is the new campaign.
DSM Watch--Day 57.