I’m Just A Boy Whose Intentions Are Good
Eric Alterman wrote a great column this week for the Center for American Progress, Think Again: Michael Moore, Cause For War? You might agree with him that the Fourth Estate appears hypocritical by suddenly discovering integrity now, with Moore, or you might agree with Ellen Goodman, as I do, that The Left Doesn’t Need A Limbaugh. It’s the discussion, minus the Cheneyesque retorts, that gives the left the civil high ground. We’ll concede the moral high ground to the Pharisees. We have manners and we can disagree with our worst enemy without calling him an asshole. That’s a schoolyard tactic and we’ve progressed since then. Sure, none of us will ever have a radio show that will make drivers of big red pickups guffaw, crank up the volume, and slap their knees as they cut you off on I-95. That is a minor sacrifice. We can reflect quietly in our reading rooms and be quite content.
Having said that, don'cha really hate it when somebody starts a new paragraph with the hackneyed expression “having said that?” Yes, something was said and now that thought is complete, but I don’t have sufficient respect for your reading skills to believe you can detect the difference between a transition and a break. Not that I believe you’re stupid or anything. I’m more like Eric Burdon, just singing “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.”
A misunderstanding is the natural consequence of being misled, and that's the reason for the Alterman link. Buried (but not dead yet!) in his article is a link to a revealing PDF file: the report prepared by the Committee on Government Reform Minority Office for Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-CA) called "Iraq on the Record: The Bush Administration's Public Statements on Iraq," It tallies the number of misleading statements about Iraq, from September 2002 to January 2004, by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and Rice. It even has a graph of monthly totals! If you don’t have the patience to amble through a 36-page report, here is the scorecard:
Bush – 55
Cheney – 51
Rumsfeld – 52
Powell – 50
Rice – 29
I’m kinda disappointed in Condi, aren’t you? Here the “guys” were racking up Michael Jordan numbers while she was slacking. Still, you can’t evaluate performance by points alone – she probably led the team in assists. Most of the points (161 of them) were scored before March 2003 - the months leading up to the war - while Dick Cheney, oblivious to the buzzer, continues scoring to this day with his bizarre insistence that Saddam collaborated with Osama.
We used to do something like that when I was a kid, when our ragtag bunch of country cagers got our roundball butts kicked by an athletically superior team. We’d shoot lay-ups long after they left to celebrate, pretending our points still counted - until we'd scored enough to beat them by just one imaginary point.
All told, the Dream Team scored 237 points. Michael Moore will be shooting lay-ups for a very long time.
3:11:37 AM 
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