I'm now watching the Pentagon press conference with Major Austin Pearson. Watching the press ask questions about weapons is just funny as they have ZERO idea what they are talking about. It's also sad to watch them try and trick Major Pearson. They clearly have an agenda to help Senator Kerry and make this a bigger issue than it really is. My take is that do you trust the IAEA or our folks in the military. It looks like our guys took many of the weapons out and destroyed them (that's good policy). Our military guys did there job. Is it the fault of the Bush administration if weapons were removed before the war? Is it possible that looters were able to remove tons of explosives?
Kerry has staked the last week of the election on the premise that the Bush administration is at fault for losing 377 tons of high level explosives to looters. Now, it looks like that did not happen. Looters may have gotten a small portion of the material but that's about it. What will Kerry do now? I'm predicting they are digging into the life of Major Austin Peason right now and will do what they can to discredit him.
Posted by Tim at October 29, 2004 09:40 AMMedia bias is the real issue in this campaign's October Surprise. Its all in how you FRAME the question!
The media and even Republicans are asking the wrong questions about the missing weapons material.
Instead of focusing on whether they were there before the war or after, the better questions for the media are:
1) If Bush had NOT went in at all, HOW MUCH HCX/weapons munitions would be missing? 100%!!! Is the glass half full or half empty? The Dems are focusing on the latter. Republicans need to focus on the former. The troops have found alot MORE than the amount said to have been lost since the invasion. We would have no control over ANY of it, plus Saddam would be in direct position to sell those materials to terrorist groups, if there was no Iraq war. It is like blaming the fire department for rushing to a fire of a neighborhood, and blaming them or the fire department chief for incompetence after they save most of the neighborhood but lose one house to the fire. If they did not fight it at all, 100% of the houses are lost! Whether the job of guarding them was perfect or not, not going in, Kerry's favored position, a wrong war wrong time wrong place, cannot improve the safety of anyone relative to going in, missing some, and garnering tons more AND removing Hussein!
2) Since HCX and many of the fabled munitions WERE classified as WMD by the United Nations, the missing point is that the media all along argued no WMD existed, so the war was built on lies, but obviously if these could have been used to build WMD, and were in and of themseleves classified as such *BY* the UN, Bush's Iraq argument has been proven, there were WMD's in Iraq! Why is the media ignoring this? Kerry is proving by admitting those weapons were there to be used by terrorists on Americans and the world that Iraq and Saddam *WAS* a threat worth removing, ASAP!
3) Did the United Nations try to control our election by helping dump this October Surprise? Is that fair? What about CBS, who last time dropped phony documents on us, and this time planned to run this story without giving Bush a fair chance to respond on Sunday night, October 31? This 100% negative against Bush painting of issues by making them be repeated again and again, like Abu Grahib, is unfair to Bush. Does anyone believe this all is happening by accident? Now old Halliburton charges are the top story, the Terrorist video threatening us all is looked at for a few seconds, and dropped. Could it be that that "story" would help Bush and these others hurt him? Why are there literally NO bad stories on Kerry? With tons of arguments against him from Vietnam era issues on down the line, the whole issue is ignored. For several elections, 100% of the "scandals" are against Republican candidates, from the 92 surprise on Bush 41 Weinberger indictments, to the DWI in 2000, but none on Clinton in either campaign, none on Gore and none on Kerry! What gives? Republicans should DEMAND balance and fairness and argue the media is doing another CBS type fiasco...
