Sad but true
A vice president unbound
Nation & World
By Gloria Borger
It would, of course, be very satisfying if we could tie up all the bother-some questions in a neat knot and put them to rest. As in: Was there a "collaborative relationship" between al Qaeda and Iraq? Did Iraq have anything at all to do with 9/11? Did our leaders "lie" to us or "mislead" us intentionally about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction to make the case for war? Or was it just a case of lousy intelligence?
Forget it. After all the investigations, all the reports, all the commission findings, we are no closer to figuring this thing out beyond a shadow of a doubt. All we have is shadow.
…Here's the deal: The question of any Iraq-al Qaeda tie is now a matter of politics, not intelligence. It's a fight about credibility, as Cheney complained--both his and the president's. "I don't feel persecuted," he said. "I don't need to…The press is, with all due respect, there are exceptions, oftentimes lazy, oftentimes simply reports what somebody else in the press said without doing their homework."
It's about exaggerating or lying or misleading if you're an anti-Bush Democrat. And if you're a pro-Bush Republican, it's about fighting the war on terror, about the administration's credibility. And, as Cheney added last week, it's also about the "vaunted New York Times " and a media bias in which news outlets "fuzz up" the facts. "Sometimes it's ignorance," he told me. "Sometimes it's malicious." Other words used: "irresponsible" and "outrageous." Here we go again. Attacking the media never hurts in a campaign.
