Can the members of the White House press corps read?

Do they read The New York Times?

Do they read Frank Rich’s columns?

Or are they STUPID and UNINFORMED on purpose?

Rich gives them the facts; all they have to do is USE them when
questioning Tony Snow or Bush.

And keep in mind …

This White House gang is so practiced in lying with a
straight face that it never thinks twice about recycling its
greatesthits.

Random question: Is Condoleezza Rice the MOST USELESS Secretary of
State ever?

———————————————————-

*Lying Like It’s 2003*

by Frank Rich
The New York Times
Jan 20 2007

Those who forget history may be doomed to repeat it, but who could
imagine we’d already be in danger of replaying that rotten year 2003?

Scooter Libby, the mastermind behind the White House’s bogus scenarios
for ginning up the war in Iraq, is back at Washington’s center stage,
proudly defending the indefensible in a perjury trial.

Ahmad Chalabi, the peddler of flawed prewar intelligence hyped by Mr.
Libby, is back in clover in Baghdad, where he purports to lead the
government’s Shiite-Baathist reconciliation efforts in between visits to
his pal Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran.

Last but never least is Mr. Libby’s former boss and Mr. Chalabi’s former
patron, Dick Cheney, who is back on Sunday-morning television floating
fictions about Iraq and accusing administration critics of
aiding Al Qaeda.

When the vice president went on a tear like this in 2003, hawking Iraq’s
nonexistent W.M.D. and nonexistent connections to Mohamed Atta, he set
the stage for a war that now kills Iraqi civilians in rising numbers
(34,000-plus last year) that are heading into the genocidal realms of
Saddam.

Mr. Cheney’s latest sales pitch is for a new plan for “victory”
promising an even bigger bloodbath.

Mr. Cheney was honest, at least, when he said that the White House’s
Iraq policy would remain “full speed ahead!” no matter what happened on
Nov. 7.

Now it is our patriotic duty — politicians, the press and the public
alike — to apply the brakes.

Our failure to check the administration when it rushed into Iraq in 2003
will look even more shameful to history if we roll over again for a
reboot in 2007.

For all the belated Washington scrutiny of the war since the election,
and for all the heralded (if so far symbolic) Congressional efforts to
challenge it, too much lip service is still being paid to the deceptive
P.R. strategies used by the administration to sell its reckless
policies.

This time we must do what too few did the first time: call the White
House on its lies.

Lies should not be confused with euphemisms like “incompetence” and
“denial.”

Mr. Cheney’s performance last week on “Fox News Sunday” illustrates the
problem; his lying is nowhere near its last throes.

Asked by Chris Wallace about the White House’s decision to overrule
commanders who recommended against a troop escalation, the vice
president said, “I don’t think we’ve overruled the commanders.”

He claimed we’ve made “enormous progress” in Iraq.

He said the administration is not “embattled.”

(Well, maybe that one is denial.)

This White House gang is so practiced in lying with a straight face that
it never thinks twice about recycling its greatest hits.

Hours after Mr. Cheney’s Fox interview, President Bush was on “60
Minutes,” claiming that before the war “everybody was wrong on weapons
of mass destruction” and that “the minute we found out” the W.M.D.
didn’t exist he “was the first to say so.”

Everybody, of course, was not wrong on W.M.D., starting with the United
Nations weapons inspection team in Iraq.

Nor was Mr. Bush the first to come clean once the truth became apparent
after the invasion.

On May 29, 2003 — two days after a secret Defense Intelligence
Agency-sponsored mission found no biological weapons in trailers
captured by American forces — Mr. Bush declared: “We found the weapons
of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories.”

But that’s all W.M.D under the bridge.

The most important lies to watch for now are the new ones being
reiterated daily by the administration’s top brass, from Mr. Bush and
Mr. Cheney on down.

You know fiasco awaits America when everyone in the White House is
reading in unison from the same fictional script, as they did back in
the day when “mushroom clouds” and “uranium from Africa” were the daily
drumbeat.

The latest lies are custom-made to prop up the new “way forward” that is
anything but.

Among the emerging examples is a rewriting of the history of Iraq’s
sectarian violence.

The fictional version was initially laid out by Mr. Bush in his Jan. 10
prime-time speech and has since been repeated on television by both Mr.
Cheney and the national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, last Sunday
and by Mr. Bush again on PBS’s “NewsHour” on Tuesday.

It goes like this: sectarian violence didn’t start spiraling out of
control until the summer of 2006, after Sunni terrorists bombed the
Golden Mosque in Samarra and forced the Shiites to take revenge.

But as Mark Seibel of McClatchy Newspapers noted last week, “the
president’s account understates by at least 15 months when Shiite death
squads began targeting Sunni politicians and clerics.”

They were visible in embryo long before that; The Times, among others,
reported as far back as September 2003 that Shiite militias were
becoming more radical, dangerous and anti-American.

The reasons Mr. Bush pretends that Shiite killing started only last year
are obvious enough.

He wants to duck culpability for failing to recognize the sectarian
violence from the outset — much as he failed to recognize the Sunni
insurgency before it — and to underplay the intractability of the civil
war to which he will now sacrifice fresh American flesh.

An equally big lie is the administration’s constant claim that it is on
the same page as Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki as we go full speed
ahead.

Only last month Mr. Maliki told The Wall Street Journal that he wished
he “could be done with” his role as Iraq’s leader “before the end of
this term.”

Now we are asked to believe not merely that he is a strongman capable of
vanquishing the death squads of the anti-American cleric Moktada
al-Sadr, his political ally, but also that he can be trusted to produce
the troops he failed to supply in last year’s failed Baghdad crackdown.

Yet as recently as November, there still wasn’t a single Iraqi battalion
capable of fighting on its own.

Hardly a day passes without Mr. Maliki mocking the White House’s
professed faith in him.

In the past week or so alone, he has presided over a second botched
hanging (despite delaying it for more than two weeks to put in place new
guidelines), charged Condi Rice with giving a “morale boost to the
terrorists” because she criticized him, and overruled American
objections to appoint an obscure commander from deep in Shiite territory
to run the Baghdad “surge.”

His government doesn’t even try to hide its greater allegiance to Iran.

Mr. Maliki’s foreign minister has asked for the release of the five
Iranians detained in an American raid on an Iranian office in northern
Iraq this month and, on Monday, called for setting up more Iranian
“consulates” in Iraq.

The president’s pretense that Mr. Maliki and his inept, ill-equipped,
militia-infiltrated security forces can advance American interests in
this war is Neville Chamberlain-like in its naiveté and
disingenuousness.

An American military official in Baghdad read the writing on the wall to
The Times last week:

“We are implementing a strategy to embolden a government that is
actually part of the problem. We are being played like a pawn.”

That’s why the most destructive lie of all may be the White House’s
constant refrain that its doomed strategy is the only one anyone has
proposed.

Administration critics, Mr. Cheney said last Sunday, “have absolutely
nothing to offer in its place,” as if the Iraq Study Group, John Murtha
and Joseph Biden-Leslie Gelb plans, among others, didn’t predate the
White House’s own.

In reality we’re learning piece by piece that it is the White House that
has no plan.

Ms. Rice has now downsized the surge/escalation into an “augmentation,”
inadvertently divulging how the Pentagon is
improvising, juggling small deployments in fits and starts.

No one can plausibly explain how a parallel chain of command sending
American and Iraqi troops into urban street combat side by side will
work with Iraqis in the lead (it will report to a “committee” led by Mr.
Maliki!).

Or how $1 billion in new American reconstruction spending will
accomplish what the $30 billion thrown down the drain in previous
reconstruction spending did not.

All of this replays 2003, when the White House refused to consider any
plan, including existing ones in the Pentagon and State Department
bureaucracies, for coping with a broken post-Saddam Iraq.

Then, as at every stage of the war since, the only administration plan
was for a propaganda campaign to bamboozle American voters into
believing “victory” was just around the corner.

The next push on the “way forward” propaganda campaign arrives Tuesday
night, with the State of the Union address.

The good news is that the Democrats have chosen Jim Webb, the new
Virginia senator, to give their official response.

Mr. Webb, a Reagan administration Navy secretary and the father of a son
serving in Iraq, has already provoked a testy exchange about the war
with the president at a White House reception for freshmen in Congress.

He’s the kind of guy likely to keep a scorecard of the lies on Tuesday
night.

But whether he does or not, it’s incumbent on all those talking heads
who fell for “shock and awe” and “Mission Accomplished” in 2003 to not
let history repeat itself in 2007.

Facing the truth is the only way forward in Iraq.