Why I'll Always Have a Job
(and all my English-teacher friends, too)

Liberal Oasis reminds us all of this exchange from the darkest days of Monica:

JIM LEHRER: You had no sexual relationship with this young woman?

BILL CLINTON: There is not a sexual relationship. That is accurate.
-- PBS Newshour, 1/21/98

That was the big dog's way out, playing with verb tense, and he was absolutely skewered for it. I mean, even Bart Simpson said nobody cares what his definition of is is. It was a cheap, transparent attempt to dodge what he should have owned up to in the first place.

But note what the Whopper's up to now:

Q: Do you still believe they were trying to buy nuclear materials in Africa?

GEORGE W. BUSH: Right now?

Q: No, were they? The statement you made --

BUSH: One thing is for certain. He's not trying to buy anything right now. If he's alive, he's on the run.
-- South Africa Press Conference, 7/9/03

Again, verb tenses mean you can evade the real question.

And I firmly believe "We have found the weapons of mass destruction"--in reference to rusted-out hydrogen trailers--is the Whopper's "I did not have sex with that woman."

And it's coming from all of the Pants on Fire Singers (the Whopper's backup band). Rumsfeld's dodging on capitol hill yesterday:

The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit [of weapons of mass destruction]. We acted because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light - through the prism of our experience on September 11th.

This sheds a lot of light on Rumsfeld's earlier careful parsing:

Since we began after September 11th we do have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al-Qaeda members including some that have been in Baghdad. We have what we consider to be, a very reliable reporting of senior level contacts going back a decade and of possible chemical and biological agent training.

"Going back a decade" here apparently means intelligence collected a decade ago. In fact, the Whopper's team has made a lot of noise of late about how Bill Clinton had the same evidence in 1998, and it led him to bomb the crap out of Iraq then.

In fact, no one in the administration--or on Blair's team in the UK, where the water's a whole lot hotter--has been able to point to a single credible intelligence report from the last five years. Not one.

Powell's dog-and-pony show at the UN in February is now in serious disrepute, since he's been found to have mistranslated key parts of phone calls, and on-the-ground inspections of sites in his pretty pictures have turned up exactly zero evidence of any WMDs.

And are we supposed to just sit here and take it? No! Ari Fleisher wants us to do something:

"I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are."

(Pause for laughter.)

But what's got me is the Pants on Fire Singers' use of language. In fact, Ari Fleischer is sounding more and more like the Iraqi Information Minister. Dig this, from Monday:

Q: I just want to take you back to your answer before, when you said you have long acknowledged that the information on yellow cake turned out to be incorrect. If I remember right, you only acknowledged the Niger part of it as being incorrect -- I think what the --

FLEISCHER: That's correct.

Q: I think what the President said during his State of the Union was he --

FLEISCHER: When I refer to yellow cake I refer to Niger. The question was on the context of Ambassador Wilson's mission.

Q: So are you saying the President's broader reference to Africa, which included other countries that were named in the NIE, were those also incorrect?

FLEISCHER: Well, I think the President's statement in the State of the Union was much broader than the Niger question. [. . .]

Q: The President's statement was accurate?

FLEISCHER: We see nothing that would dissuade us from the President's broader statement. [. . .] I'm sorry, I see what David is asking. Let me back up on that and explain the President's statement again, or the answer to it.

The President's statement was based on the predicate of the yellow cake from Niger. The President made a broad statement. So given the fact that the report on the yellow cake did not turn out to be accurate, that is reflective of the President's broader statement, David. So, yes, the President's broader statement was based and predicated on the yellow cake from Niger.

Q: So it was wrong?

FLEISCHER: That's what we've acknowledged with the information on --

Q: The President's statement at the State of the Union was incorrect?

FLEISCHER: Because it was based on the yellow cake from Niger.

(Josh Marshall has the whole thing, and another post clearly catching Ari in a bald-faced lie here.)

Ari very nicely manages to offer up a version of the latest spin--"It was just one line in the State of the Union"--while also providing cover for anyone defending the Whopper's claims. But when pressed, he does admit, if you can unravel it, that the whole "nucular" weapons from Africa bit was indefensible without giving us a sound bite!

That's what this administration does: The document trail is there, and it's clear for anyone with the time or inclination to read it. But they never leave the sound bite; they never give the network TV producers a money shot. I mean, even the Whopper's "We have found the weapons of mass destruction" I cited above is not sexy enough to do the kind of damage that "I did not have sex with that woman" did.

And if I had a nickel for every time Rumsfeld answered a serious question with sarcasm . . .

But why I'll always have a job--and my fellow English teachers, too--is because we are the ones responsible for training the rest of you to have the patience and the analytical skills to follow that paper trail. If we keep waiting for an "I did not have sex with that woman" moment, the Whopper and the Pants on Fire Singers will never fall. If they can't damn themselves in eight seconds or less, the vast expanse of America will never know.

For example, I was listening to "Talk of the Nation" on my drive home today, and Tom Gjelton was explaining all the various deceits uncovered in the last four months, but he couldn't do it in less fifteen minutes. If we can't get this reduced to a sound bite, we may never win. I still like Bush lied, people died. (And in full English teacher mode: I recognize that it's a run-on.)

For fun, learn some Bushonics.

UPDATE: Here's another one from Powell yesterday:

But to think that somehow we went out of our way to insert this single sentence into the State of the Union Address for the purpose of deceiving and misleading the American people is an overdrawn, overblown, overwrought conclusion.

Of course we don't think you tried to slip in one deceptive sentence! The whole damn thing was a lie! Colin, we used to like you . . .