News Hounds: Alan Colmes Speaks Truth To Senator Lindsey Graham And Graham Calls It "A Bunch Of Garbage"

News Hounds: Alan Colmes Speaks Truth To Senator Lindsey Graham And Graham Calls It "A Bunch Of Garbage"

Alan Colmes Speaks Truth To Senator Lindsey Graham And Graham Calls It "A Bunch Of Garbage"
With his "promote President Bush by bashing Bill Clinton" strategy evidently not working so well, Sean Hannity has switched to the "Clinton did it, too" Plan B just at the same time the Republican party has adopted the technique as a means to shore up Bush's eroding support for the Iraq war. Last night's (11/15/05) guest for the "If Clinton did it, then it was good for Bush to do it, too" segment was Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. Unfortunately, for Senator Graham, he was confronted by the truth from Alan Colmes and Graham could not refute it.
Hannity started off the segment by playing a clip from a new video by the Republican National Committee (nice way to sneak in GOP propaganda and call it news). As the music from "Low Spark Of High-Heeled Boys" played, the audience was treated to scene after scene of prominent Democrats saying they believed Saddam Hussein had WMD's. No shot of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Hussein, though.
Sanctimonious as ever, Hannity pointed his finger at the Democrats for attacking Bush for having lied, "yet they, themselves, said the exact same things at the time." With his most sincere expression, Hannity said that the criticism of Bush "seems unprecedented in American history while our troops are in harm's way."
Hannity must have forgotten some of his own statements. As Daily Kos reports, on 4/5/99 Hannity said the following about Milosevic and the war in Kosovo, during Clinton's presidency: "I guess this is why it's so ill-conceived from the very beginning. You know, they didn't anticipate that his popularity would rise. They didn't anticipate that he would beef up his reign of terror, if you will, against the ethnic Albanians. They didn't anticipate the refugee problem, and they didn't anticipate that they would also run out of bombs. So it seems that we're talking about a very ill-conceived military action here. And now the question is, do you go in further and deeper, or do you pull back and rethink what the strategy's going to be here, because there has really been no stated goal, mission or objective."
When it was Alan Colmes' turn, he told Graham that Clinton didn't start a war against Iraq, he used "pinpoint bombing which the Kay report said actually helped reduce his weaponry."
Apparently, Graham had no answer for that. Sounding a bit frustrated, he said, "Do you believe for one moment that everybody in the world got it wrong and the only person who intentionally got it wrong was George Bush?"
Colmes said that the president gets different intelligence than the US senators and he played a clip of Senator Pat Roberts acknowledging that fact.
As the screen said "Iraq blame game," (a way for FNC to politicize and trivialize the issue) Lindsay said that "From 1998 to the present, every major political figure in this country, from President Clinton to Madeleine Albright to the Congress has believed this man was procuring weapons of mass destruction. Every major intelligence agency in the world came to the same conclusion. Generals on his staff believed they had weapons of mass destruction."
Colmes objected that they didn't believe that attacking Iraq was the right way to deal with it.
"That was not the question," Graham said.
"But that's the issue. The issue is a decision was made based on faulty intelligence, or based on cooked intelligence, and based on intelligence that he saw that was not the same as the senators who voted on it saw."
Graham said that "The President of the United States ACTED," (his emphasis) and that he acted after Saddam Hussein threw out the UN weapons inspectors.
Colmes said, "We (my emphasis) removed them. We took the weapons inspectors out, Senator."
Graham insisted, "He removed the inspectors, not us... He obviously wasn't going to share information about his dictatorship."
But USA Today backs up Colmes. It reported on 3/17/03 that the US advised the inspectors to leave. It also quoted Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency as saying, "I should note that in recent weeks, possibly as a result of increasing pressure by the international community, Iraq has been more forthcoming in its cooperation with the IAEA." The paper also reported that he added " that inspectors still have found no evidence that Saddam Hussein has revived his nuclear program."
Nevertheless, as Hannity ended the segment, Graham said, "This is a bunch of garbage."
Comment: The fact that the GOP would defend Bush by drawing parallels between him and the until-now evil Democrats speaks volumes about either their desperation, their foolishness or both.