Truth - Al Franken [137]
5 See Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, chapter 19.
1 Because the total intelligence budget is classified, it’s impossible to know how deep Kerry’s cuts really would have gone. But the best estimate is that his cuts would have amounted to about 3.7 percent.
2 After my last book, some of younger and/or less bright readers complained that they couldn’t tell when I was joking and when I was merely reporting true things in a comedic manner. The quote from Cheney about “making the right choice,” while cartoonishly inflammatory, is real. The quote about terrorists attacking swing states, is, to my knowledge, just something I made up.
3 In fairness, Ridge also made twenty appearances in nine non-swing states during the campaign season.
1 The entire quote is even more damning: “I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is also fallacious. I think if we were going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force because I do not believe he would wait in the Presidential Palace for us to arrive. I think we’d have had to hunt him down. And once we’d done that and we’d gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we’d have had to put another government in its place. What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shi’i government or a Kurdish government or Ba’athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable? I think it is vitally important for a President to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U.S. military force. And it’s my view that the President got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq.”—Dick Cheney, the Washington Institute’s Soref Symposium, April 29, 1991.
2 He later said that he misspoke, and that he’d meant to say “reconstituted his nuclear program.”
3 Powell would later say of the speech, which was written by the vice president’s office, “It turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong, and in some cases deliberately misleading.” Emphasis mine.
4 There was also another reason why no terrorist network would gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime. Can you guess what it was? Here’s a hint. It was the same reason that no terrorist network could get a signed Mickey Mantle rookie card from the Iraqi regime.
5 This, by the way, is a complete misrepresentation. (I’d say deliberate misrepresentation, but Giuliani probably had no idea what he was talking about.) As Flynt Leverett, who served on Bush’s National Security Council, explained in a January 23, 2004, New York Times op-ed, Libya gave up its WMD not because of the war in Iraq, but because of negotiations that began in secret during the Clinton administration. In fact, Leverett pointed out that Libya’s story was an argument against Bush’s foreign policy approach, because Libya was offered a carrot (lifting of sanctions and normal diplomatic relations) and not just a stick. As Leverett wrote, “Until the administration learns the real lessons of the Libyan precedent, policy toward other rogue regimes is likely to remain stuck in the mud of ideology.” Qadhafi was playing his cards brilliantly by agreeing to disarm just days after Saddam was captured