The administration begins to crack...

[Andrew Mayer]

"I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are."
-Ari Fleischer

It's for real (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/09/international/worldspecial/19CND-INTE.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=).

They're beginning to lose it.
Is it time to break out the popcorn?

[TimElhajj]

Wow, that's some quote.

[Ben]

That quote is so great it hurts my brane.


Whatever they pay him, it's not enough. How can those words come out of a person's mouth?

That's 10x as great as the "defintion of 'is' is".

[Tom Chick]

To be fair, Andrew truncated the quote, which goes:


"I think the American people continue to express their support for ridding the world of Saddam Hussein based on just cause, knowing that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons that were unaccounted for that we're still confident we'll find. I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are."

Fleisher's statement is predicated upon the fact that there are weapons unaccounted for. He wants people to 'tell the world' where those unaccounted weapons are, not where the weapons are that 'he didn't have'.

It only sounds outrageous if you take it out of context.

-Tom

[Tyjenks]

Out of context quotes at Qt3?!?!

I have gone from reading quotes here to assuming everything is being taken out of context. Some folks around here (not singling you out Andrew, BTW) are as bad as politicians and ministers for grabbing snippets of speeches or text and bending it to serve their purposes.

[chet]

Tom, in politics (and maybe elsewhere) you are the problem.

You are why conservatives are winning.

Because if a liberal had said the shortened quote, the conservative talk shows would have had it out on the airwaves as fact, out of context, shmout of context - who cares.

The non-conservative talkshows/press continually fail lately because they use logic or look for truth and meaning behind the words. So stop. Shut up. Start referring to Ari as Comical Ari and just keep pounding it into the ground that he is an idiot.

Chet

[Mark Asher]

"I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are."

That's a complete sentence. How can you parse it so it makes any kind of sense? He's saying that the people who doubt the existence of WPMs in Iraq should tell the world where "they" are, with "they" referring to, I have to believe, the WPMs. How can you read that any other way? He's asking the critics to find the weapons that the critics don't think exist.

[Rywill]

Give me a break, Mark. If you read the sentence preceding the quoted one and the quoted one together, the reference is obvious.

[awdougherty]

This administration is giving me kidney stones. With Clinton, you could argue he was a scumbag with some shady financial dealings, but this administration strikes me as white-collar criminals of nearly the worst degree with hard-ons for war (maybe ties in with white collar stuff).

[chet]

Rywill, but if you read the preceding sentence, the idea of WMD existing is used as a given, an unassailable fact. Are you saying the ideas in that sentence can't be challenged? Because if they can be challenged, then the last sentence is still garbage.

Chet

[Daniel Morris]

Tom Chick! Bravo!


Mark Asher! http://www.fas.org/news/un/iraq/s/990125/

[freeman]

Give me a break, Mark. If you read the sentence preceding the quoted one and the quoted one together, the reference is obvious.

Actually, it isn't.

"I think the American people continue to express their support for ridding the world of Saddam Hussein based on just cause, knowing that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons that were unaccounted for that we're still confident we'll find."

How does that meaningless jumble clarify the quoted sentence?

[Chris Nahr]

Give me a break, Mark. If you read the sentence preceding the quoted one and the quoted one together, the reference is obvious.

Yeah, but that one sentence still doesn't make any sense. Fleischer is the White House spokesman, not some random dork. Is it too much to ask that his sentences actually make sense? That's not actually related to the Iraq situation per se, it just shows that another member of the current US administration has severe problems with the English language.

[Jason McCullough]

Muahahahaha!

[antlers]

Even in context the sentence is stupid.

If there were WMD and we don't have them and Saddam doesn't have them, that means that they are likely in the hands of individuals or terrorist organizations. This is not a good thing. The burden of proof is on the Bush administration to show that they did not screw up the WMD hunt.

[Troy S Goodfellow]

Fleischer is right that there is a burden on the entire international community to determine what happened to the weapons we knew about five years ago.

But this does not relieve the current administration of the burden to prove its recent claims of new evidence and Iraq being an imminent threat in cahoots with Al Qaeda.

Troy

[MikeOberly]

Fleischer is the White House spokesman, not some random dork.

Actually,he's a random dork who just happens to also be the White House spokesman.The qualifying sentence is badly composed nonsense,and the following sentence is just a non-sequitur.It comes across as the raving of some barely literate propaganda minister.

[Major Malphunktion]

The president of the United States and the secretary of defense would not assert as plainly and bluntly as they have that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction if it was not true, and if they did not have a solid basis for saying it.
Ari Fleischer December 6, 2002



We know for a fact that there are weapons there.
Ari Fleischer January 9, 2003


I think you have always heard, and you continue to hear from officials, a measure of high confidence that, indeed, the weapons of mass destruction will be found.
Ari Fleischer
April 10, 2003


Well, now he is asking for our help to tell him where they are:
Phone:202-456-1111
[email protected]

[MarchHare]

But this does not relieve the current administration of the burden to prove its recent claims of new evidence and Iraq being an imminent threat in cahoots with Al Qaeda.


They've already given up on that though.

http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030710.urums0710/BNStory/International/



The U.S. administration has abruptly revised its explanation for invading Iraq, as Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asserted that a changed perspective after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — not fresh evidence of banned weapons — provoked the war.

"The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass murder," Mr. Rumsfeld testified yesterday before the Senate armed services committee.

"We acted because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light, through the prism of our experience on 9/11."

It was an about-face from a man who confidently proclaimed in January: "There's no doubt in my mind but that they [the Iraqi government] currently have chemical and biological weapons." (He was seconded in March by Vice-President Dick Cheney, who said of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein: "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."

[awdougherty]

I wish I could have been in the press room when Ari made that statement just to hear the collective "hunh?" that had to have gone up.

[Andrew Mayer]

I think the phrase that best describes what Ari is doing would be "Spinning out of control"

[awdougherty]

I almost can picture Ari getting the morning info that he has to spin, doing a quick couple of shots involving 12,000 proof alcohol, and growling "bring it" in his best Bruce Campbell.

Maybe he somtimes substitutes "is this all you got?" for bring it.

[Jason McCullough]

TPM (http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/):


Some military jets are equipped with the ability to toss off a cluster of flares in mid-flight to throw off heat-seeking missiles. I think that's what Ari Fleischer and the White House were doing yesterday when they admitted that the president's State of the Union claims about Iraq buying uranium in Africa were wrong.

[Rywill]

Rywill, but if you read the preceding sentence, the idea of WMD existing is used as a given, an unassailable fact. Are you saying the ideas in that sentence can't be challenged? Because if they can be challenged, then the last sentence is still garbage.

Chet
That's a separate argument, I guess. The UN said he had the weapons. Maybe you know something they don't.

I mean, I agree that Fleischer worded the whole thing badly, which is pretty inexcusable for a White House Press Secretary. And I certainly agree that the Administration is backpedalling in an attempt to reduce the impact of not finding WMD and the damaging revelations about how they lied to the public. But it's untrue and unfair to pretend that the Administration has suddendly decided that the WMD have been found unless someone proves otherwise.

[Bub, Andrew]

TPM (http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/):


Some military jets are equipped with the ability to toss off a cluster of flares in mid-flight to throw off heat-seeking missiles. I think that's what Ari Fleischer and the White House were doing yesterday when they admitted that the president's State of the Union claims about Iraq buying uranium in Africa were wrong.

Excellent!

[Jason Lutes]

Fleischer's had to spout so much outright malarkey that It's no wonder he's quitting. If Mordor had been a democracy, the Mouth of Sauron would have quit too.

[Skies]

Now that was funny.

[Daniel Morris]

Just for funsies, Ari Fleischer used "revisionist" again in today's briefing:


"This revisionist notion that somehow this is now the core of why we went to war, a central issue of why we went to war, a fundamental underpinning of the president's decisions, is a bunch of bull."

[Tyjenks]

I think this was his last day. He should have said that it was "a bunch of bullshit and so are you fuckers! So long!" Flipped the room off and walked out.