Thursday, September 15, 2005

The Bush Administration is a Caricature of Itself

Bill O'Reilly tries to get Condi Rice to come clean about the situation in Iraq:


O’Reilly: The truth of the matter is our correspondents at Fox News can’t go out for a cup of coffee in Baghdad.

Rice: Bill, that’s tough. It’s tough. But what — would they have wanted to have gone out for a cup of coffee when Saddam Hussein was in power?


You have to be kidding me.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Unknown said...

Golf spam. Funny.

Anonymous said...

Eh, she must have just been tired.

It's just the usual rhetorical riposte, an attempt to deflect the issue of Baghdad's current dangerous environment and recast it in terms of something everybody can agree on: how much Saddam sucked.

Except that she blew it. She should have said something like:

"Go out for a cup of coffee? Bill, I can't believe that Fox correspondents are even thinking of things like coffee that in times where we need to be focusing on the Katrina victims. Let's not play the blame game. Let's turn our attention to the people who really need help."

Anonymous said...

Their standard reply to any criticism of their Iraqi policy is that the only other choice they had was the status quo, i.e. Sadam still in power. Logical fallicy of course but the rocket scientists that work in the media never confront them with that.

Unknown said...

What I like about it what I find fascinating about a lot of Bush's stupidest statements as well - her tongue is rebelling against her brain's attempt to lie through its teeth, so instead of saying something untrue she winds up saying something that doesn't really make sense.

The standard talking point is, for example, if I say that forty thousand innocent Iraqis have been killed since the invasion, the administration response (and the response of their apologists) is to say that if Saddam had been in power during that time, he would have killed at least that many people.

This is not a very easy position to defend, but you can make statements like that and get away with them for the most part. And since it's speculative, you can convince yourself that it's true, even if the evidence doesn't really point that way.

But in this case Condi can't bring herself to say that you couldn't get a cup of coffee under Saddam, because that's just ridiculous - OF COURSE you could go out and get a cup of coffee under Saddam Hussein.

So instead she tells us we wouldn't have WANTED to get coffee under Saddam. My question is, why? Was all coffee under Saddam required to be myrrh-flavored or something? Why wouldn't I have wanted to get coffee under Saddam?

One HUGE problem with celebrity talking heads is how seriously they take themselves. Jon Stewart clearly could have handled this moment in the correct way:

Rice: Would they have wanted to have gone out for a cup of coffee when Saddam Hussein was in power?

Stewart: Uhhhhh.... Actually I think under Saddam I would have been in more of a Frappucino kind of mood. But actually, what does that have to do with anything?

markfromireland said...

Myrrh flavoured coffee .... mmmmmmmmm .... Starbucks eat your heart out