Originally posted by HatMan: And with the flood of information and non-information available, there's plenty to support both sides. And we get nowhere.
Fair enough. I wasn't in the room when everything was discussed. But I do have a number of commissions like the Robb-Silberman Commission that have been appointed to look at everything from President Daily Briefs to interviews with analysts in anonymity by those commissions. Democrats have investigated till the cows come home. Nobody has ever uncovered a shred of proof any analyst was ever pressured to manufacture a result. The Daily Briefs essentially matched the information given to the Intelligence committees. I've got several Democrats who say he didn't lie. And not a single Republican who said he did. I'd say the preponderance of the evidence show that no, he didn't. But you're right. I can't prove it in a court of law.
Here's an interesting article about liberal lies about the president and his team. Factcheck.org, run by the Annenberg Institute is famously known for its impartiality in critiquing both sides. Here's an examination of an ad a liberal anti-war group published called "They Lied." It covers quite a bit of some of the "lies" Bush and his team have been accused of. Annenberg shoots down most of the assertions and confirms none of them and shows how some of the facts were twisted by the left to fit their world view of "Bush Lied," primarily through the use of quotes out of context.
Looking back, it is now clear that much of what is quoted in this ad was, even in context, false or misleading. To say Bush and the others "lied," however, requires evidence that they knew the intelligence they were getting was wrong. The unanimous finding of the Intelligence Commission argues against that idea.
Here's another FactCheck.org analysis of those 16 fateful words in the president's State of the Union Address regarding Niger and how the left tried to use it to label Bush a liar:
What this shows is a concerted effort by the left to destroy the president by falsely accusing him of lying when not a shred of proof existed to support their assertions.
Those two FactCheck.org articles go to the core of the arguments made by the left to say that the president lied. An impartial examination shows that the left, in some cases, distorted and lied to try to prove their case.
-- Roger
"The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself." -- Benjamin Franklin
