Monday Night Live
Posted: Monday, January 29, 2007 8:03 PM by Countdown
It was four years ago yesterday that President Bush stood before Congress and the nation and, with the help of 16 words, delivered a prologue to war, a necessary war, he told America, because Iraq had pursued the makings of that ultimate weapon, affording no warning... the nuclear bomb.
Today, in our fifth story on the Countdown, Ari Fleischer, who served as the president's mouthpiece, his voice in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, took the stand in a criminal trial and revealed part of the administration's campaign to sell the war to Americans, and take down its critics.
The trial pivots on the central point...
Did Mr. Libby, the former Chief of Staff to Vice President Cheney, intentionally lie when he told investigators that reporters told him Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife was a covert C-I-A operative named Valerie Plame -- rather than that he told others about her?
While the political significance of the trial pivots on another central point:
Did the administration intentionally lie when it told Americans that intelligence made the war in Iraq necessary -- rather than that the desire for war in Iraq made the intelligence necessary?
Two and half weeks after the President announced a planned troop increase in Iraq...
Five days after he re-iterated it in the State of the Union...
Four days after a democratic resolution opposing the plan passed a Senate Committee...
U-S backed Iraqi troops kill 200 enemy fighters in a single raid.
Our fourth story on the Countdown -- the timing might instigate cynicism; the realities suggest otherwise.
This weekend's raid happened not where the troops are supposed to surge -- in Baghdad, or in Anbar Province.
But rather, in Najaf.
And the enemy wasn't Al Qaeda, or Baathists, or radical death squads backed by Iran, but instead a messianic, Shiite cult, looking to bring about Armageddon.
Jane Arraf reported from Baghdad.
ODDBALL
A Rocket car crash, a bullfight gone wrong, and your big head Hillary dress... video coming shortly.
In the parallel universe of politics, it's the equivalent of those Disney World commercials filmed right after the Super Bowl:
"You've just decided to run for President, what are you going to do now?"
"I'm going to Iowa!"
Our third story on the Countdown, Senator Hillary Clinton hits the Hawkeye state, campaigning... and singing... and further nuancing her stand on Iraq with the implication we need to be out of there -- or on the way out of there -- before Mr. Bush is on his way out of the White House.
Making her first visit as a Presidential candidate to the first stop on the campaign trail over the weekend and choosing a town hall question and answer session to step up her rhetoric against the administration.
“This was his decision to go to war with an ill-conceived plan and an incompetently executed strategy, and we should expect him to extricate our country from this before he leaves office.”
The White House responding the way it often does to those who disagree with it - by labelling criticism... partisanship.
"It is disappointing that Senator Clinton is responding to the President's new strategy for Iraq with a partisan attack that sends the wrong message to our troops, our enemies, and the Iraqi people who are working to make this plan succeed."
You would think that surviving a mountain lion attack would be all fate would ask of a 70-year old man in Northern California.
Not so.
In our number two story on the Countdown, tonight Jim Hamm has been transferred to a San Francisco hospital.
An infection that found its way in through the wounds inflicted by the animal, has now led doctors to list Mr. Hamm in critical condition.
WPITW
Andrew Sullivan hates girls, and the FOX Noise Channel take the top two spots with smears of Obama, Hillary, Anderson Cooper and... of journalism itself.
It was the masterful, late and lamented comedian Bill Hicks who pointed it out in the starkest terms:
If those really were intelligent beings from another planet or even universe coming to earth in what we call U-F-O's...
Why did they invariably show up in out-of-the-way places, along America's truck routes and rural outposts?
Tonight, in our number one story on the Countdown, perhaps the first true evidence of intelligence from outer space.
Flying saucers seen... over Hawaii.
We talk with Lester Velez, Assistant State Director for MUFON, The Mutual UFO Network.
GN&GL...you can continue the discussion at Countdown Nation
