- #1
SOS2008
Gold Member
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Since I could not find the original thread on this topic, and it is not in the directory of frequently discussed topics (but should be), here’s an update on a few (major) events:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10576609/page/3/Call it the year of lame excuses [or more lies]
By Alex Johnson
Reporter
MSNBC
Updated: 9:04 a.m. ET Dec. 29, 2005
“I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees,” President Bush said on Sept. 1, three days after Hurricane Katrina punctured the system of dams protecting New Orleans and created the greatest natural disaster in American history.
Unfortunately for the president, that wasn’t true, as news reports about studies that did just that would make clear. But it sounded good at the time.
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Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said three days later, explaining why his department was slow to respond to the devastation. “Because, if you recall, the storm moved to the east and then continued on and appeared to pass with considerable damage but nothing worse.”
Of course, it didn’t. And even if it had, that would only have meant that the bullet took out Mississippi and Alabama, rather than Louisiana. But it sounded good at the time.
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Fifteen years after she collapsed in a coma and seven years after various members of her family began fighting in court over what to do with her, Terri Schiavo died in a hospice in Pinellas Park, Fla., in March. The battle over which relatives should have the final say in whether to remove her feeding tube turned into a proxy for the abortion wars as figures from Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to the Rev. Jesse Jackson weighed in on the meaning of life.
Quotation: “This is not somebody in a persistent vegetative state,” Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., a physician, diagnosed in Washington after watching Schiavo on videotape. Turns out she was, as her autopsy revealed.
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The CIA leak investigation ground on, bringing the indictment of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, and the jailing of New York Times reporter Judith Miller. At year’s end, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald impaneled a new grand jury to continue his investigation, leaving the fate of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove unresolved.
Quotation: “I’m not going to discuss an ongoing legal proceeding,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan said over and over, backtracking from his firm statement two years ago that Libby and Rove “assured me they were not involved in this.”
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The U.S. military death toll topped 2,000 — a symbolic milestone that the White House dismissed as substantively meaningless — and Bush himself put the total number of Iraqis killed at 30,000.
Quotation: “It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong,” Bush said in December, after his administration largely denied exactly that for almost three years.