"Who Lied?" Bush did!

[BluffTHIS!]

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I can't imagine that Richard Nixon would be the first choice for objective peopole to consult on an issue of integrity.

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Bill Clinton was reported to have consulted Nixon on political matters before Nixon's death. So he was actually the first person consulted by others of low integrity, which further validates your point.

[andyfox]

Well, RN is dead, so I guess that would indeed make Bill Clinton the last person in the world to consult on matters of integrity.

[andyfox]

Nixon was a pathological liar his entire life. It wasn't his underlings he was trying to protect when lying about Watergate, it was himself. A small example: When he first made the "contents" of the tape public, he only released transcripts. He did this so that he could lie about what they said. He said that when somebody suggested they could raise money to pay off the burglars, Nixon said that he said it would be "wrong." He meant by this that to buy their silence would be immoral. But that's not what he said nor what he meant. What he said was that it would be the wrong way to raise the money, that it might be discovered.

[BluffTHIS!]

No one has offered any conclusive proof that Bush lied, but rather that he assigned a higher probability to intel being correct than it should have been given. But why was that?

Let's say the intel properly analyzed would only lead one to conclude that there was only a 25% probability of Saddam having an ongoing chem weapons program or stockpile of useable weapons. But you have to add two other probabilities to that. The first is that Saddam would lie about same, and the second is that weapons inspections wouldn't be good enough to tell if he did. When you add those 3 probabilities together, it is very reasonable indeed to conclude a greater than 50/50 chance that Saddam has useable chem weapons, and to conlude as well that given his proclivity for using same on his own people, that such a combined probability was too great to go unanswered during a war against terrorism when rogue nations and bad actors like Saddam would be the biggest threats to supplying terrorists with such weapons.

And the true importance of the old and unusable chem weapons found (and one also has to look at how long they had been unusable to make any determination as well), is that Saddam did lie and the weapons inspectors did fail to find those old weapons. Thus the 2 other probablistic assumptions in the equation were valid and justified acting on intel that by itself wouldn't be credible enough.

[Cyrus]

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No one has offered any conclusive proof that Bush lied, but rather that he assigned a higher probability to intel being correct than it should have been given.

[/ QUOTE ]You would be correct if Bush had used at any time any of the terms "probably" or "possibly". As it is, I do not recall Bush being anything other than absolutely certain about the WMDs. And I remember Powell, in his U.N. show-and-tell, trying to present to the world "conclusive proof" that Iraq possessed WMDs.

[Copernicus]

Bluff, you want to bother writing a logic tutorial when people have such difficulty with something as simple as the definition of a lie? Talk about an exercise in futility!

[BluffTHIS!]

Copernicus,

It depends on what the definition of "is" is.

[Copernicus]

Well, obviously the meaning of "is" is context dependent.

Ie the context of an impeachment hearing.

[Cyrus]

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Bluff, you want to bother writing a logic tutorial when people have such difficulty with something as simple as the definition of a lie?

[/ QUOTE ]Lying is intentionally distorting or changing the truth. Here's the dictionary.com definition :

Lying; to lie (v.) : To present false information with the intention of deceiving.

It describes quite well George W Bush's claims about Iraqi WMDs and the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

[cardcounter0]

Funny how conservatives have such problems knowing what a lie is, or knowing when one is told to them.

A lie is the opposite of the truth. Lies require grasping at straws and exteme justifications to make them seem reasonable. The truth usually stands on it own, and doesn't require smoke, mirrors, and constant spin.