"Larry Wilkerson himself said that everything that was in Colin Powell's speech, he believed, the French believed, the Germans believed, the British believed. These were things that were believed."
In fact, the French and the Germans rejected everything in Colin Powell's speech, and three weeks afterward wrote that "no evidence [not inconculsive evidence or fragmentary evidence, but no evidence] has been given that Iraq still possesses weapons of mass destruction or capabilities in this field."
"Are they guilty of manipulating intelligence on WMD? That, I think, is the thing they are least guilty of. .. the Robb report, which showed there was no political pressure; there was a Senate intelligence report; there was a Butler report. There were all of these reports. None of them found manipulation of intelligence."
Actually, all of those investigations were circumscribed to avoid looking at the political pressure brought to bear. The bottom line is that after the inspectors revealed there was no evidence of WMD, the flawed U.S. intelligence no longer remained as a valid excuse. Yet Bush ignored the evidence and invaded anyway.
But getting back to Brooks' latest Times column, where he continues to imputes the Republican agenda onto Congress and the President:
Fourth, the president introduced the public option to its own exclusive Death Panel. As Max Baucus has said, the public option cannot pass the Senate. On Wednesday, the president praised it, then effectively buried it. White House officials no longer mask their exasperation with the liberal obsession on this issue.
Fifth, the president also buried the soak-the-rich approach. The House Ways and Means Committee came up with a plan to raise taxes on the rich to pay for health reform. That's dead, too. Health reform will be paid for by changes within the health care system. The president underlined his resolve to cut $500 billion from Medicare and Medicaid. This is a courageous move that moderates appreciate.
Brooks' "soak the rich" scam is a polite version of the teabagging nonsense. A 5.4% surcharge on someone's second million in annual income hardly brings tax burden of the rich back to the socialist days of the Clinton adminsnitration. He's already misrepresented the tax proposals on yet another Sunday morning talk show. On The NewsHour he said that healthcare reform would trigger tax increases, "And not only on the top 2 percent, further down."
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