Fred Barnes ... hopeless (or worse):

The Daily Howler reports the following exchange on Fox's Special Report:

On last night’s Special Report, Brit Hume started the panel in orderly fashion; he read off six “false impressions” about Iraq which Al Gore had blamed on the Bush Admin. “Well, some of it was true,” Juan Williams said, agreeing with the things Gore said. And that’s when Barnes began his faking. No, we really aren’t making this up. Yes, the corrupted man said it:

WILLIAMS: Well, some of it was true.

BARNES: I didn’t notice any.

WILLIAMS: Well, I think it’s true when [Gore] says that President Bush led us to believe that somehow Saddam Hussein might have had connections to Al Qaeda—

At this point, Fred cut Williams off. Try to believe that this fake, phony man has reached the point where he’ll actually say this on television:

BARNES (continuing directly): I think Bush said exactly the opposite, consistently! Exactly the opposite!

Howler then goes on to cite a New Republic article which report a number of instances when Bush and others in the administration asserted that there were ties between Hussein and al Qaeda.

But there's more. As it turns out, we did our own little survey ten months ago, restricted to statements by Bush himself in his 2002 campaign effort. Between October 10 and November 4, Bush made the following claims about Hussein in speeches (i.e. not off-the-cuff remarks):

• "This is a person who has had contacts with al Qaeda."
• "He's got connections with al Qaeda."
• "This is a guy who has had connections with these shadowy terrorist networks."
• "We know he's got ties with al Qaeda."
• "We know that he's had connections with al Qaeda."
• "He's had connections with shadowy terrorist networks like al Qaeda."
• "We know that he has had contacts with terrorist networks like al Qaeda."
• "This is a man who has had contacts with al Qaeda."
• "This is a man who has had al Qaeda connections."
• "He's had contacts with al Qaeda."
• "This is a man who has got connections with al Qaeda."

(Go to our earlier post for dates, locations, and whitehouse.gov links for all these quotes)

We only looked at a restricted time period: 25 days - in which Bush said 11 times that there was a tie between Hussein and al Qaeda - or about once every couple of days. On the political oscilloscope, that's a very high frequency.

Bob Somerby of the Howler sums it up: ... what Barnes had said was utterly, one hundred percent false.

posted by Quiddity at 8/08/2003 07:41:00 AM