Heh, so TorgoX says Bush should be impeached for directing Cheney to counter Joe Wilson's statements.
Two problems.
First, even if you disagree with what Bush did, nothing he did in this was remotely impeachable. What was actually done? He released the Iraq NIE -- something that most people wanted released, including antiwar Democrats and the press -- to counteract claims made by Wilson. How is this worthy of impeachment?
Second, what Wilson said was actually false, in a few ways, but most importantly, in that the British intelligence Bush based the "16 words" on in his 2003 State of the Union speech was from completely separate intelligence than anything Wilson had any knowledge about. Wilson kept claiming he showed Bush's WMD claims were false, except that he had no actual knowledge or evidence that this was the case, since the only stuff he knew about wasn't actually being used in the claims.
So how does this amount to impeachment: doing something completely innocuous in order to show that someone who was wrong, was wrong? I can't figure it out. I am blinded by facts.
Re:Fact checking
kjones4 on 2006-07-20T07:05:15
Forgot to link to it:
http://www.factcheck.org/article222.htmlRe:Fact checking
pudge on 2006-07-20T07:43:42
Yeah. Especially the part where Wilson repeatedly, falsely, claims the 16 words in the SOTU were regarding anything Wilson himself knew about it. He called it a lie, but he had no basis whatsoever for calling it a lie, since he was not privy to the British intelligence it was based on.
Although, I've read the U.S. report, and I am frankly not convinced that the information Wilson provided is reasonably strong "confirmation that Iraq may indeed have been seeking uranium from Niger." This seems to be based entirely on the notion that Niger's former prime minister says he was contacted by an Iraqi delegation (and the report doesn't even identify any of the people in this delegation, whether they were officially from the government, and so on) that wanted to discuss "expanding commercial relations." Some analysts say this meant they wanted to discuss uranium sales, but that seems pretty shaky to me.
But while I don't buy that Wilson's trip gave any real confirmation of Iraq's attempts to procure uranium, it certainly didn't discount the claim Bush made, in any way.
