Anti-Iran Rhetoric

Anyone who hasn't been comatose for the last couple of years knows that there's been a lot of heated rhetoric from right-wingers to drum up support for attacking Iran. Josh Marshall and the folks at veracifier.com put together a video montage showing some of the saber-rattling from the Bush administration and its various supporters.

Of course we now know, in light of the recently-released NIE, that Iran discontinued its nuclear weapons programs in 2002. It was also recently revealed that Bush knew this fact no later than August 2007. And we're beginning to find out about other White House officials, most notably Dick Cheney, who knew about it much earlier. Yet, as you'll see, many of the bellicose statements in the video were made after August 2007.

It's also interesting to note how the White House's obedient sock puppets — Lindsey Graham, for example — repeat verbatim the talking points handed them by their overlords. There really is a right-wing echo chamber, isn't there?

(Click below to play video)

Watch Dana Squirm

In today's White House press conference the questions were polite but aggressive. The gist of them can be paraphrased as follows:

Is President Bush the personification of ultimate evil
or merely an extremely incompetent boob? †

It was Dana Perino's job to smile confidently and persuade the press corps that they were just being silly and blowing this whole "NIE thing" out of proportion. You be the judge of whether she succeeded or just made matters worse...

(Click below to play video)

† Keith Olbermann put it less politely:

We have either a president who is too dishonest to restrain himself from invoking World War III about Iran at least six weeks after he had to have known that the analogy would be fantastic, irresponsible hyperbole; or we have a president too transcendently stupid to have asked, at what now appears to have been a series of opportunities to do so, whether the fairy tales he either created or was fed were still even remotely plausible.

A pathological presidential liar, or an idiot-in-chief? It is the nightmare scenario of political science fiction: A critical juncture in our history and, contained in either answer, a president manifestly unfit to serve. And, behind him in the vice presidency, an unapologetic warmonger who has long been seeing a world visible only to himself.