Quotes of the Morning: Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

“Reports in the British press this month based on documents indicating that President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair had conditionally agreed by July 2002 to invade Iraq appear to have blown over quickly in Britain.
But in the United States, where the reports at first received scant attention, there has been growing indignation among critics of the Bush White House, who say the documents help prove that the leaders made a secret decision to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein nearly a year before launching their attack, shaped intelligence to that aim and never seriously intended to avert the war through diplomacy.”
-LA Times, May 12, 2005

“But, but… That can’t be right! We invaded Iraq because he was developing weapons of mass destruction. We swore we’d stop them from being developed so that ‘rogue nations’ couldn’t pass them on to terrorists or use them themselves. Dang it, we were the good guys. We didn’t do it just because it was ‘Iraq’. We did it because a rogue nation was developing weapons of mass destruction. We had to, and we’d do it again to any rogue nation that we had to in order to stop proliferation of WMD.”
-Skippy

“North Korea said Wednesday it has completed removing spent fuel rods from an atomic reactor, enabling it to harvest more weapons-grade plutonium. It was the communist state’s latest provocation amid deadlocked talks over Pyongyang’s nuclear program.
A North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said the country had ‘successfully finished’ removing 8,000 fuel rods from the reactor at its Yongbyon complex, which was shut down last month, so it can ‘bolster its nuclear arsenal.’”
-Associated Press, May 11, 2005

“I’m sure we’ll invade North Korea next month in order to stop him too.. right? Darn it, if this keeps up I’m going to start thinking that the war on terror is some kind of farce used to justify our war in Iraq and anything else our administration wants to do.”
-Skippy

“The Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level, Ridge now says.
Ridge, who resigned Feb. 1, said Tuesday that he often disagreed with administration officials who wanted to elevate the threat level to orange, or ‘high’ risk of terrorist attack, but was overruled.”
-USA Today, May 11, 2005

“Why, that almost sounds like (dare I say it?) the terror alerts were.. political. I can’t help but notice that there haven’t been any since the election. Probably just a coincidence.”
-Skippy