Whopper of the Week?
by Kevin
Update: It appears I was a little sloppy myself. What Volokh has been debunking was mostly the Bushism of the Day not the Whopper of the Week. I still think the idea is the same, Slate is using word games to try and knock the Bush administration. Quite often they stretch the truth to do it.
Does anyone even understand why Slate continues its Whopper of the Week thing? I mean the Volokh Conspiracy has debunked more than I can count and now Andrew Sullivan points out another false “Whopper.”
Maybe if the you caught someone in an outright lie every week the thing might work, but when you have to resort to the type of statements that Noah does it makes you look bad rather than the person accused. If you are going to claim someone lied then you should have the proof not just an assertion.
On the whole, however, I think this type of thing is a bit sophomoric; a kind of gadgetry journalism. It provides no context or big picture information but instead feeds off the sound bite world it claims to critique. It is exactly the type of thing that can make Slate so annoying.
Well, you can say this for Slate–you don’t have to pay for it.
I think the “thorough debunking” of this is sophomoric as well.
Rumsfeld DID say, “There is no question but that they would be welcomed.”
The open arms part is pretty much understood, Sully. It’s what you call a figure of speech.
Christ, this is like the “cake walk doesn’t mean easy” debate.
Maybe they should be paying their readers ;-)
Furthermore, what about this one?
When testifying about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the House Armed Services Committee Sept. 18, 2002, Rumsfeld said Saddam “has amassed large clandestine stocks of biological weapons.” including anthrax and botulism toxin and possibly smallpox. His regime has amassed large clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX and sarin and mustard gas.”
Saddam “has at this moment stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons,” he later added, repeating the charges the next day before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
He repeated that theme in the weeks preceding the war.
Last month, after U.S. weapons hunters reported to the administration and Congress that they have yet to find a single weapon of mass destruction in Iraq, Rumsfeld was asked about his earlier statements.
A reporter at a Pentagon news conference asked: “In retrospect, were you a little too far-leaning in your statement that Iraq categorically had caches of weapons, of chemical and biological weapons, given what’s been found to date? You painted a picture of extensive stocks” of Iraqi mass-killing weapons.
“Wait,” Rumsfeld interjected. “You go back and give me something that talks about extensive stocks. The U.N. reported extensive stocks. That is where that came from. I said what I believed to be the case, and I don’t – I’d be surprised if you found the word ‘extensive.’”
Give me a fucking break. Are we supposed to let him off because he describes them as “large” raither than “extensive”? Since he names 6 varieties of WMD, I’d say that fits the bill of extensive, i.e. many and sundry.
If you don’t agree with my logic, I challenge you to find one single quote where Al Gore claimed to have “invented” the internet.
scarshapedstar-
It’s also true the U. S. troops are welcomed. Only the heroes of the western left, the Baathists and other glorious shit of the revolution against freedom are not welcoming the U.S.
When will hell swallow up the evil leftist shit?
Oh, give me a break scarshapedstar. He said :
“During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”
Are you going to split hairs on that one?
Now, for Rumsfeld’s quote, do you have a link to the purported NPR interview? I found this, which claims “Feb. 20, a month before the invasion, Rumsfeld fielded a question about whether Americans would be greeted as liberators if they invaded Iraq.” leading to your quote. But, the NPR website hasn’t got a reference to such an interview. Where is it, so that we may judge the context for ourselves?
“Christ, this is like the “cake walk doesn’t mean easy” debate.”
And just as stupid because CLINTON said it would be a cake walk.
scarshapedstar
You are correct, he actually said he took the initiative in
“creating” the internet.
Huge difference between creating and inventing, no?
Reid, your response to scarshapedstar about Gore is actually incorrect. Al Gore never claimed to invent the internet – the protocols and design were created mostly by DARPA-funded institutions in the early 70′s. However, Senator Gore played a major part in the 80′s in making the DarpaNet publicly and commercially available to the world as the Internet, since it had previously only been available to the government and certain defense-dept-funded universities.
“Cakewalk” does mean “easy,” more or less – but no one in the administration used the word. Ken Adelman, a proponent of Bush policy but not an official, is the one who used the term, and he was applying it to the war, not to the entirety of war and reconstruction. He still maintains that the prediction was fair, and it’s certainly a lot closer to the reality than the forecasts of millions of refugees, massive humanitarian and ecological disaster, Baghdad-as-Stalingrad, two-day-slowdown as a quargmire, and so on, and so on.
And it is indisputable that the Americans were welcomed in much of the country as liberators, and are still thought of that way by many Iraqis -certainly by enough of them to validate the prediction.
As a strong supporter of the war – with or without deployed or deployable WMDs – I concede that Rumsfeld’s and others’ language appears to have oversold the intelligence, treating speculation as facts and observations based on past situations as current. Of course, it’s still quite conceivable that, at the time Rumsfeld and others made such statements, the facts may have been exactly as rendered, and that future revelations will in the main bear the pre-war statements out.
We still don’t know if, when, or how Saddam disposed of his WMDs and stockpiles. We do know, however, that many administration critics are guilty of precisely the behaviors that they claim to find so reprehensible: Treating speculation as fact, and twisting and misstating the evidence for political purposes.
Jesus, Jase. I gave you a link and everything. Go look for yourself.
“Cakewalk” does mean “easy,” more or less – but no one in the administration used the word. Ken Adelman, a proponent of Bush policy but not an official, is the one who used the term, and he was applying it to the war, not to the entirety of war and reconstruction. He still maintains that the prediction was fair, and it’s certainly a lot closer to the reality than the forecasts of millions of refugees, massive humanitarian and ecological disaster, Baghdad-as-Stalingrad, two-day-slowdown as a quargmire, and so on, and so on.
And it is indisputable that the Americans were welcomed in much of the country as liberators, and are still thought of that way by many Iraqis -certainly by enough of them to validate the prediction.
As a strong supporter of the war – with or without deployed or deployable WMDs – I concede that Rumsfeld’s and others’ language appears to have oversold the intelligence, treating speculation as facts and observations based on past situations as current. Of course, it’s still quite conceivable that, at the time Rumsfeld and others made such statements, the facts may have been exactly as rendered, and that future revelations will in the main bear the pre-war statements out.
We still don’t know if, when, or how Saddam disposed of his WMDs and stockpiles. We do know, however, that many administration critics are guilty of precisely the behaviors that they claim to find so reprehensible: Treating speculation as fact, and twisting and misstating the evidence for political purposes.
Gore’s biggest mistake. Got everybody typing www.
Jase, that was my point. Gore did just what he claimed to do, create the Internet, as in the thing that’s in most of our homes, businesses, schools, etc. as opposed to the network in military installations. The “liberal media”, in their 20-month assault on Al Gore, acted as though he claimed to have written packet switching protocols. They even started saying things like “Al Gore claimed to have ‘invented’ the internet”, which is a BLATANT falsehood; the man did not once say the word. Case closed.
There was some big flap by Republicans recently, about a reporter doing the same thing; I can’t recall the incident, and the Lileks entry mentioning it is as yet unarchived. I though that was interesting.
But anyway. I am going to use some Glennuendo and say that it’s interesting how nobody has actually responded to the real point of my post.
How do you reconcile Cheney’s statements?
Also, all of you failed my challenge, thereby proving my point: if you act like Cheney is in the right by splitting the very smallest hair, large vs. extensive, then I am completely correct in saying that Al Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet.
Roger, that could become their working motto:
Slate–you don’t have to pay for it.
(And it’s worth every cent.)
Roger is right, I feel that I got my money’s worth today.
Anyway, I always thought tht a quote was supposed to be something that someone actually enunciated, not just something that the listener implied. Obviously the glorious J-school graduates know better than we unwashed heathen. If Rummy said that he loves his wife, would it be acceptable for a journo to report that he, “…slams her doggy-style every night”? Or is that just a figure of speech?
Roger is right, I feel that I got my money’s worth today.
Anyway, I always thought that a quote was supposed to be something that someone actually enunciated, not just something that the listener implied. Obviously the glorious J-school graduates know better than we unwashed heathen. If Rummy said that he loves his wife, would it be acceptable for a journo to report that he, “…slams her doggy-style every night”? Or is that just a figure of speech?
The lack of invective and name calling in this comments section is fantastic.
These days, in our oh so “modern” times, parsing every single word somehow merits consideration. I recall many Iraqis welcoming our troops (once they finished the “cakewalk”) with open arms in Baghdad like it was Midnight on new year’s eve.
Now it seems that Iraq realizes it has a very bad hangover. Iraq is one seriously decimated (from confidence to physical plant) place within a highly problamatic region. Was this a mystery to anyone? Did anyone reading this need some Gov’t blowhard to tell you this essential fact?
On top of it all we have the US where we are pretty “squared away”. It is easy to sit here so enjoyibly pontificating how to make Iraq reconstruction work like a Swiss watch. This type of dissent and parsing of pre-war statements seems to be a good theoretical study of how a free society should operate. I think not.
The current situatiation is a physical and psychological experiment involving 130,000 young Americans who need the support of the whole country to do their job. You can talk all you want about all of the reasons, goals, missteps, etc. until we are all blue in the face. Bottom line: we need to be behind the effort, warts and all, because of all of those kids, future VFW folks, who are doing our bidding.
It seems that the “mainstream” press and the hard left choose to let our kids twist in the wind to win a silly game of gottcha. This makes me physically sick and violently angry. It’s not entirely their fault, however, as some on the right did the same thing when our kids were putting it ALL on the line in Kosovo.
Cheers, Horst
@Roger
Haha, you got that right.
The “open arms” is most definitely not “understood”. That would be putting words in his mouth that he neither said nor implied. The usage of “open arms” connotes an overwhelming action of welcome. Were you to come to my home upon invitation, I would welcome you. Were you a family member returning from vacation, it might be with “open arms”. You know the difference.
Additionally, what was the question posed to Rumsfeld? It was *specifically* if he said troops would be “welcomed with open arms”. If he did not say it, he did not say it. Case closed. This is an area where you are not allowed the convenience of implication and inference. He was asked about a quote and the quote he was asked about never came from his mouth.
Um, so who is this “Al Gore,” and why does anyone care?
Horst,
You say that Republicans did the same thing with Kosovo, but I beg to differ. Sure, they were pretty against going in in the first place, but once we were there, they were “in it to win it.” Did they criticize how the war was being handled? Yes, because they wanted the US to win. Are the lefties criticizing the way it’s being handled? Not really. They’re still trying to keep it from happening. They don’t want us to win.
There’s a big difference between the Republican criticism of Kosovo and the left criticism of Iraq.
I’m just tired of reading and hearing that Republicans did the same thing. Not really. Not when you look at the specifics.
NKR
Here’s a whopper for you, c/o http://www.blog-irish.com
November 14, 2003
Rupert’s List: The Independent’s Rupert Cornwell Repeats a Well-Exploded Canard.
Yesterday, (Nov 13), Andrew Sullivan noted Rupert Cornwell’s Bush Bashing in the London version of our lovely Indo.
But Sullivan missed the best part.
At the top of his list of the dreadful things Bush has allegedly done, (“Bush telegraph: selected presidential facts”) Cornwell places
“In May 2001, Bush’s government gave $43m to the Taliban.”
This canard apparently originated with Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times, and was, unbeknownst to us, exploded by Spinsanity.
When Fintan O’Toole of the Irish Times repeated it, we, Leibnitz to Spinsanity’s Newton, independently researched it and exploded it.
Instapundit took note of all of this.
The facts are that the Bush administration gave $43 million to the UN and NGO’s for famine relief in Afghanistan, carefully ensuring that the money did not go to the Taliban.
And the facts were not hard to discover. If a claim sounds preposterous, just do a little research. It took a lone blogger in the Liberties less than an hour to uncover the facts in October of 2001.
What prevents a featured reporter with a major newspaper from doing so? And why does he repeat such canards years after they have been exploded?
Its enough to make one start blogging again.
BRAN
(Posted on November 14, 2003)
I think there’s two different points here. 1) Did Rumsfeld say what Noah is accusing him of saying? Apparently not. 2)Did the Administration underestimate the amount of resistance there was going to be in Iraq? I’d tend to say yes – there were people talking about being out of there in a few months. (No, I don’t have any quotes.) It could be that the Administration was trying to underplay the postwar difficulty they expected to make the idea more palatable to the American public, but I believe that’s what we call a bait-and-switch. But that’s the problem with things like the “Whopper”; if you don’t have the facts exactly right, people can jump on that and ignore whether your broader point is accurate.
One other thing: As a regular Volokh reader, I didn’t remember a lot of debunkings of “Whoppers”. I searched their archives, and found only 3 entries under “Whopper”, and one of them talked about it favorably. Given Eugene Volokh’s precise writing style, if he was discussing a “Whopper of the Week”, the word would appear in the item. Maybe you’re confusing it with the many, many “Bushisms” that Eugene has broken down.
I think all this research into who said what when is very entertaining.
Now, when do we start car-bombing mosques?
All this debate about who said what to whom when is extremely entertaining. Thank you all.
Now, when do we start car-bombing mosques?
Car-bomb mosques.
I suppose it’s my own military experience (1st Lt
Inf, 8th Cav, 1st Cav, parachute qualified) that convinces me we are going about this wrongly.
Which is not the same thing as saying that a lot of childish sniping and word-play from the left is something I agree with. Oh no.
Instead of worrying about whether or not some dumbass civilian leader said ANY military operation was going to be easy or a cakewalk or a day at the beach, or anything else, we should be worrying about how we’re going to win this thing.
My experience is that I would do anything to avoid being in front of a U.S. combat unit intent on killing me. Or a Black Hawk-not-called-Longbow-for nothing. Or that C-130 they’ve loaded up with machine guns that shoot so fast they hum and a recoilless rifle (“rifle” as in 105).
The outcome we’ve got is precisely the outcome we should expect: asymetric; amoral. We will never win it with the power we project unless…
It’s time to quit parsing words in the past and start making life sufficiently unpleasant for the average, fundamentalist (that’s damn near all of them) Muslim that he will band with others of like mind to kill these sons-of-bitches themselves.
Start by car-bombing some mosques.
NKR
Point taken. The hard left is much worse in many ways for the current engagement. I do recall, however, that right-wing pundits were trying to score political points during Kosovo. I was sickened by it at the time (sorry, don’t have specific examples) and believe it has now given the “mainstream” (unbiased and unarrogant) press and the left wing base an excuse for their current seditious behavior.
Also, I hold the right more accountable for national security and will be displeased by any appearance of playing “gotcha” while our young people are in harms way.
Horst
Al Gore SAID he took the took the initiative in creating the Internet – links are out there; I even heard him say it! He doesn’t hold a patent on the internet, so I assume that his creation was pro bono and he took no money for his creation. Good for him, I’m also assuming he sits on some board at CERN.
As far as Rumsfeld talking about WMD, he did use the word “clandestine.” I guess that means “secret” that might imply such “stockpiles” are not out in the open, that is: they’re hidden. Strange that the weapons weren’t out in the open like they were supposed to be. Odd, that.
From:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june03/rumsfeld_2-20.html
Quote:
JIM LEHRER: Do you expect the invasion, if it comes, to be welcomed by the majority of the civilian population of Iraq?
DONALD RUMSFELD: There’s obviously — the Shiite population in Iraq and the Kurdish population in Iraq have been treated very badly by Saddam Hussein’s regime. They represent a large fraction of the total. There’s no question but that they would be welcomed.