You Ain't Seen Huffin' Like the Flighty Quinn

Several days ago I wrote about a column in the Middletown, NY Times Herald-Record by THR columnist Beth Quinn, called "Proof is in the Memo: Soldiers Died for a Lie."

The article revolved around the so-called Downing Street Memos (DSMs); a group of seven leaked British government documents written in 2002 in advance of the coalition invasion of Iraq. Record columnist Quinn focused solely on the first of the seven DSM documents, echoing a claim of many on the far left that the document "proved" that President George W. Bush had "fixed" government policy around going to war with Iraq at all costs. According to this theory, Bush wanted war and was not pursuing any other options, and thus lied to the American people when he said in widely reported statements at the time that options other than war were still available.

Using this dubious claim, the Record's Quinn reiterated her claim over and over again that President Bush lied, and that 1,700 American soldiers died-"based on a lie."

It turns out lies were being spread, not by the President, but by Beth Quinn. Her outright lies and omissions of the truth never should have made it to print.

I cannot see where this is any less an offense than those cases of
embellishing, exaggerating and outright lying that got Janet Cook (Washington Post), Stephen Glass (New Republic), Patricia Smith (Boston Globe), and others fired for similar kinds of behavior. more...

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Lying for a Living: THR Columnist Exposed

The Times Herald-Record's Beth Quinn has made it abundantly obvious that she's a columnist instead of a reporter. Reporters rely on facts when composing a story. Quinn's, “Proof is in the memo: Soldiers died for a lie,” editorial shows that she is unencumbered by such constraints.

The high-pitched polemic professes to be about the now infamous meeting minutes of top British government officials that became known as the “Downing Street Memo,” or the DSM. Liberals such as Quinn claim that the document shows that President Bush knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq, and that he was determined to attack seven months before the war.

The DSM does not in fact show that. As a matter of fact, six more documents were leaked by the same source, and some flatly contradict the claim, but you won't here that from the Record's Quinn. She either didn't bother to research the subject, or made the conscious decision to ignore the evidence. It seems her hatred of President Bush was more important than the truth. Quite frankly, I'm surprised her editorial made it to print.

Even her understanding of the original DSM as a stand-alone document is nearly nonexistent.

Quinn makes the claim that the original DSM “is a report on a meeting between Rycroft and the White House in July 2002.” That is patently false. The DSM was the minutes of a meeting—not a report—among top British officials. The White House is never mentioned, and the only mention of Bush was the comment that “it seemed” he had made up his mind. This is hardly evidence. This is an opinion, and one that turned out to be wrong, as later documents showed.

Quinn spews:

What we're talking about here is proof that Bush engineered the war in Iraq – based on a lie.
What we're talking about here is 1,700 dead Americans – based on a lie.

What we're talking about here is Lou Allen of Milford, Pa.; Brian Pavlich of Port Jervis; Eugene Williams of Highland; Irving Medina of Middletown; Doron Chan of Highland; Catalin Dima of White Lake; Brian Parrello of West Milford, N.J.; Kenneth VonRonn of Bloomingburg; Joseph Tremblay of New Windsor.
All dead – based on a lie.

There are lies being perpetrated, but they manifest from Beth Quinn, not George Bush. She presents the hearsay contentions of the Downing Street Memo as documented fact, but Quinn's fellow liberal Michael Kinsley said:

But even on its face, the memo is not proof that Bush had decided on war. It says that war is "now seen as inevitable" by "Washington." That is, people other than Bush had concluded, based on observation, that he was determined to go to war. There is no claim of even fourth-hand knowledge that he had actually declared this intention. Even if "Washington" meant actual administration decision makers, rather than the usual freelance chatterboxes, C is saying only that these people believe that war is how events will play out.

In short, Quinn presents “we think he might” as “he said he would.” This is patently dishonest, especially when taken with the fact that the other DSMs explicitly state that Bush had not “fixed” his policy on an invasion.

The David Manning memo to Tony Blair, one of the additional documents leaked, says in a telling line, “Bush wants to hear you [sic] views on Iraq before taking decisions.” The Iraqi Options paper (PDF) specifically mentions that the United States is “considering regime change”—specifically indicating that the decision to invade had not been made.

Beth Quinn, by design and by obscuring facts that contradict her predetermined ideological position, lied to her readers. Even more disgusting is that Quinn would cheapen the sacrifice of our local servicemen in her quest to further her cause.

Quinn mentions that, “if it turns out he lied, as the Downing Street Memo most surely suggests, let's impeach him.”

I'm all for firing those who lie on the job. Perhaps we should start with Beth Quinn.

Contact the Times Herald-Record.

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Google News: It's al-Qaedariffic!

Months ago Google News made the announcement that it planned to upgrade its news service to “rank news stories by the quality and credibility of the source.” San Francisco-based Google might want to hold off on those new patents for a while though, unless they really do consider State Department-confirmed pro-terrorist web sites as quality, credible sources.

Google News proudly features this “news” article from jihadunspun.com, a known pro-terrorist propaganda site:

From Jihad Unspun:

US forces shot and killed a nine-year old Iraqi girl as she came out of her school following final exams in Baghdad. A medical specialist in Baghdad's al-Yarmuk General Hospital told the correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam that an American sniper opened fire on ‘A'ishah Ahmad ‘Umar, killing her.

For its part, the US military occupation forces announced that they had begun an investigation of the Marine who shot the little girl and promised to punish him if he is found guilty.

A source in the Iraqi puppet army told Mafkarat al-Islam that the American soldier was very drunk at the time of the killing and that he was withdrawn from his observation post after the incident.

The father of ‘A'ishah, who works for the Railroad Department said that residents in the area where his little daughter was killed told him that the American had been betting with his buddies whether he could hit the little girl who had come out of the school some 700 meters from the US observation post.

For its part, the American propaganda TV station called “al-‘Iraqiyah” blamed what it called “terrorists” for the shooting of the little girl, but subsequent statements by the US military and the Iraqi puppet forces exposed the “al-‘Iraqiyah” story to be a lie.

Where to begin? The Newsweek-quality anonymous sources? Or the fact that there are no Marines in Baghdad (they are deployed to the west)? Or the fact that U.S. forces in Iraq do not have ready access to alcohol?

No, instead we start with the fact that Google News was the focus of an article by honestreporting.com on this same pro-terror site back in January. Six months afterward, Google still features the pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic web site as a valued news contributor.

One could presumably ignore honestreporting.com, but Google News also ignored the April 8, 2005 State Department warning of Jihad Unspun's suspected al-Qaeda support:

A trio of obscure Web sites and individuals has combined to spread deliberate disinformation, particularly about U.S. actions in Iraq. The entities involved are Islam Memo (Islammemo.cc), Muhammad Abu Nasr, and Jihad Unspun (jihadunspun.net).
Most of the disinformation appears to originate with Islam Memo, which is a pro-al Qaeda, pro-Iraqi insurgency, Arabic-language Web site based in Saudi Arabia.
Muhammad Abu Nasr, co-editor of the Free Arab Voice Web site (freearabvoice.org), translates material from Islam Memo into English and posts it as "Iraqi Resistance Reports" on his Web site.
Jihad Unspun publishes selected articles by Muhammad Abu Nasr, giving them a broader audience.

There are many sites of questionable veracity to draw news articles from, but in light of the well-documented pro-terrorist background of Jihad Unspun, one might start to question the motives of those at Google News that still consider Jihad Unspun a valid news source.

Note: Hat tip to Rusty Shackleford, himself a former Google News contributor, who alerted me to this story.

Update: Instalanched before I could even fix the spelling of "al-Qaedariffic." Thanks again, Glenn. More spelling errors are available free of charge to my valued guests on the main page.

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Downing Street Downer

Voices on the political left have raised into a howl over what has become known as the Downing Street Memo (DSM), a document that claims to contain minutes of a July 22, 2002 meeting of British government officials in the build-up to the Iraq war.

Read the original Downing Street Memo,

A left-wing site dedicated to the DSM is available as well.

A quick review of the DSM conspiracy site above implies something nefarious is going on, but can't quite nail it down to specifics… but they know Bush did “something” criminal.

But what does the DSM really tell us?

Not much. It never could.

For starters, the document that became known as the Downing Street Memo is not a memo, or even a transcript of a conversation. It was, and has never claimed to be anything other than, meeting minutes.

Minutes are the paraphrased summary of a meeting. Informational points are presented and summarized, decisions noted, action items are discussed, and status updates for previous action items and decisions are presented for review. Unless transcribed from audio, they are at best the selective, paraphrased recollections of the individual taking notes during the meeting.

In practice, meeting minutes are the summary of several other summaries, filtered through one set of eyes, in fits and starts. If you have a good scribe taking minutes, he or she hopefully doesn't miss major points of the current conversation while trying to decide how to summarize what was just said. Minutes are only meant to capture high-level thoughts, and are notoriously inaccurate in the details.

That is the truth of the Downing Street Memo, and one of its many critical failure points.

Since the release of the original Downing Street Memo, other documents have come forth from the same source, and these documents flatly contradict the assertions some were making in interpreting the DSM. There was no early decision to go to war. There was no intention to set up a false WMD case.

The 9/11 Commission Report and several congressional probes also investigating these and similar claims also found that they had no merit even before the “discovery” of the DSM.

Proponents of the DSM as evidence of a smoking gun must also put aside the fact that Saddam was given a chance to comply with United Nations inspectors, and he made the conscious decision not to do so. Are we next going to hear that Saddam Hussein was in on the plan with Bush and Blair from the very beginning?

The Downing Street Memos, as the original and following documents are now collectively known, are historically interesting as they show insight into the British view of a relationship between two old allies, but that is their only real merit.

Someone gin up Lucy Rameriz. The Left is going to need more documents.

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Does it Matter?

Matt Drudge is reporting once again on allegations in the new Edward Klein book “The Truth About Hillary,” this time focusing on allegations that former President Bill Clinton is flagrantly cheating on Senator Hillary Clinton.

Drudge reports:

"Hillary's aides noticed that Bill seemed to grow even more reckless after his memoir MY LIFE became a big bestseller. Thanks to his record-shattering $12 million book advance plus another $10 million in speaking fees, he was rolling in money -- and hubris," Klein writes.

"Throwing caution to the wind, he started a torrid affair with a stunning divorcee in her early forties, who lived near the Clintons in Chappaqua. There was nothing discreet about the way he conducted this illicit relationship; he often spent the night at his lover's home, while his Secret Service agents waited in a car parked at the end of her driveway."

"It's one thing to go out to California with his wild buddies and stuff there,' said someone with intimate knowledge of the former president's philandering. 'But being indiscreet with a woman in Chappaqua steps over the line. That's the place Hillary calls home.'"

The book presents a photo of the former president 'mouth-kissing' an unidentified woman.

And there is indeed a picture of a man that appears to be the former Commander in Chief kissing a woman who is definitely not Hillary, though there is no context for the photo.

I have one question: does it matter?

I have no love for either Clinton. Bill is a philanderer, was in my opinion a weak if popular president, with few ethics and fewer lasting accomplishments. Hillary is a shrewd socialist hunting for a presidency of her own, and her ethical past is checkered, to say the least.

But isn't that enough?

Is there really a need to attack Hillary for being an enabler of a serial womanizer? Even if it does paint Hillary as an enabler of a sexual predator, does this really tell us anything we didn't already know about Hillary that we didn't know after the Lewinsky affair?

I don't see anything to gain from focussing on her personal failings, when her political failing are so much greater. We should focus on the failure of TennCare, the very real failing of her first foray into socialized medicine, and the recent flu vaccine shortage that was another direct result of her flawed socialist policy ideas. We should look at her radical political past, and her current refusal to condemn a fellow politician for comparing our military to the greatest genocidal regimes of the past century. Refusing to support our troops over such outrageous charges is reason enough to deny her the title of Commander in Chief. We should make these things our focus, not her personal weaknesses.

Her willingness to be a doormat for Bill's sexual conquests is irrelevant, except in that they serve to underscore her already well-known failures as a person of character. Hillary, almost certain to run for the White House in 2008, should be pilloried for her political failings, not her personal failures.

There are certainly enough things—Whitewater, the Rose Law Firm billing records scandal, Travelgate, and a lifetime of radical socialism far out of the American mainstream—to keep Hillary out of the White House.

Let's focus on keeping the debate in the public arena, where her long record of failure really matters.

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Overplaying The Downing Street Memo

[06-26-05 Update: Welcome Times Herald-Record readers! By now you've likely read Beth Quinn's hysterical editorial on the Downing Street Memo. This is one of two articles I've written on the Downing Street Memo. Read the second article, "Downing Street Downer" to understand why Beth's "proof" has absolutely no merit.]

“You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war,” goes the old canard from the (relatively few) half-baked half-wits that half-finished college when I was at East Carolina in the early-to-mid 1990s.

Like other clueless ideologues from the Berkshires to Berkley, they sincerely if only half-lucidly believed that capitulating to tyrants would somehow make the world a better place.

These people naively held, and indeed many still do hold, the sincere, bong-induced belief that happy thoughts will solve the words ills, that it is all just a matter of coming to a mutual understanding. Much of this crowd would like us to cut our military down to bare minimum levels—just enough to stop the enemy before they make it to Beverly Hills or the Hamptons. This is the “bake sales for bombers” crowd.

These people are fools.

"In peace prepare for war, in war prepare for peace. The art of war is of vital importance to the state. It is matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence under no circumstances can it be neglected." –Sun Tzu, circa 500 BC

Despite this, the Internet, especially center-left blogs, have been in an orgasmic frenzy over what is being called the “Downing Street Memo.” The memo purports to be the secret minutes of a meeting of a handful of high-level British government officials that took place July 23, 2002, eight months prior to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

I'd avoided talking about it until this point for several reasons.

Some on the right would point to the fact that there is not a single credible source confirming this memo's authenticity, and that it could have been fictitiously written just like the fake documents dredged up by CBS News. Only “anonymous government sources” have confirmed this document. Pardon me, Michael Isikoff, if I take“anonymous government sources” with a grain or two of salt.

But even if the Downing Street Memo is fake, I certainly hope it accurately reflects what was going on behind the scenes.

According to the memo, recent talks in Washington noted:

“…a perceptible shift in attitude. War was now seen as inevitable.”

A perceptible shift in attitude? I should certainly hope so.

Just ten months after September 11 Americans were still raw with the realization that far away terrorist regimes could indeed strike the United States. Those who kept abreast of the subject knew that Iraq played a role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing by being a refuge for the bomb-builder, and Iraq had put into motions plans to assassinate President George H.W. Bush in Kuwait.

Despite continued diplomatic pressure in the form of international sanctions, two regional wars, and a violently crushed rebellion, Saddam was still firmly in power. With little hope of a coup arising, and Saddam a continued threat to U.S. interests in the region, war was indeed inevitable at some point. The only question was, “when?”

After September 11 and the still unsolved anthrax attacks, taking out a rouge nation with a previous and flaunted history of using WMDs against both its own people and foreign nations became not just a matter of “when,” but “how soon?” in many people's estimations.

Another failure point of the memo, as pointed out by liberal Michael Kinsey, is that the memo is hardly a smoking gun impeachment document liberals have been slobbering for. Liberals harp on the claim that Bush was lying over his position about the war. But the Memo doesn't come close to supporting that assertion:

But even on its face, the memo is not proof that Bush had decided on war. It says that war is "now seen as inevitable" by "Washington." That is, people other than Bush had concluded, based on observation, that he was determined to go to war. There is no claim of even fourth-hand knowledge that he had actually declared this intention. Even if "Washington" meant actual administration decision makers, rather than the usual freelance chatterboxes, C is saying only that these people believe that war is how events will play out.

Once again, liberal hysteria is borne out only in their “reality-based” fantasy world, not in actual reality. It is quite possible, that Bush, in preparing for war, was hoping for peace, following Sun Tsu's time-honored advice. The memo simply does not address the assertion of a pre-determined war made by the left.

So the far left shrieks"cover-up!" and the rest of the world yawns.

One would be tempted to think that there is no outrage because there's nothing to hide.

Note: Also read "Downing Street Downer" to understand why the Downing Street Memo isn't the "smoking gun" liberals hope it would be.

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