Wednesday, January 29, 2003

Consider this: generally speaking, when giving a list of particulars, the rhetorically correct thing to do is build to a dramatic finish with your best points. What did Bush use to finish his list of reasons-why-Iraq-is-a-bad-place-and-we-should-bomb-it-back-to-hell? Aluminum tubes:
Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.
This aluminum tube canard is so old that it is turning as green as Bush's hair. It has been repeatedly debunked just as recently as Monday's inspection report to the Security Council. It is by far the weakest link in Bush's chain of evidence of Sadaam's perfidy. Yet he chose this item to conclude his list. Why? If Bush's point was to prove the case against Sadaam, why would he close off the bill with something so obviously weak? Perhaps because that wasn't his purpose last night. Bush doesn't care about proving anything. He cares about scaring the living bejeesus out of the American people. Nook-u-lar weapons are scarier then chemical and biological weapons so they are the best choice for concluding a list of terror. For years I never understood the hullabaloo that was the multiple Clinton scandals. All of that noise, yet very little sense was to be made of it all. That is until I realized that most of the accusations against the Clintons were easy to understand so long as you didn't presume the Clintons were guilty. Similarly, most of the rhetoric from the Bushies is confusing as hell, but only so long as you presume that they actually have the best interest of the American people at heart. Once you acknowledge the possibility that they would deliberately scare the citizenry in order to get what they want then most of what they do makes perfect sense. Occam's razor strikes again.

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