Thursday, July 14, 2005

Mehlman and Rogers: Ministers of Disinformation

Mehlman on Hardball yesterday:
    Karl Rove said to a reporter that you ought not include the Joe Wilson report because it's inaccurate. And Karl was right. Mr. Wilson was wrong. The report was inaccurate. He was wrong in the sense that the vice president had not sent him down. And it's rather amazing that right now we have got Democrat leaders, we've got the guy that ran for president, John Kerry, we've got Senator Clinton, former first lady, calling for someone to lose their job, smearing someone politically who is fully complying with an investigation over what you just described.

    [snip]

    ED ROGERS, REPUBLICAN CONSULTANT: Well, I'm not sure that Joe Wilson had all the facts and had all the facts right. And his report has been critiqued pretty seriously by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee and been pretty much debunked. Nobody put a lot of stock in the Joe Wilson report that we know was now contrived by him and his wife in the first place. And he was a Kerry guy, was a Kerry supporter. Bob knows that. Bob was probably in touch with him.

    So, nobody put a lot of credence in his report from the get-go.

    MATTHEWS: Bob Shrum, were you involved with the mission to Niger, as just—you were just accused of?

    BOB SHRUM, FORMER KERRY CAMPAIGN SENIOR ADVISER: Actually, I never talked to Joe Wilson, never talked to him in my life.

    Number two, Joe Wilson voted for George W. Bush in the year 2000. He is no partisan Democrat. Number three, Ronald Reagan used to say facts are stubborn things. And here are the facts. There was no yellow cake. Iraq was not running a nuclear program based on material from Niger. There were no weapons of mass destruction.

    But we are dealing here with the fruit of the poison tree, which is, we went to war on a false, intended or unintended, pretext. And now, to get out of it and to try to protect Karl Rove, we are having a second attempt at character assassinating Joe Wilson and his wife, who is a CIA operative.

    ROGERS: No, we had—we just had an election about that. We just had an election about Bob just said. And Bob was one of the architects of the Kerry campaign, the architect of the Kerry campaign. That was rejected. We had an election that settled the claims that Bob just stated.
I find it extremely interesting that they are elevating Kerry's profile at this particular moment, and in this particular way. Not to mention the revival of that old Republican favorite, "We won so shut up."

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