Yep, the White House has a war room to deal with Iraq. Not to figure out how to succeed and prevent further death and carnage. No, of course not. They set up a public relations war room to fight the spin war, to smear their opponents and control the media. Imagine, just imagine, if they put as much time in to trying to figure out how to solve the quagmire in Iraq:
As Congress fled the capital for Thanksgiving, and Bush made his way back from a trip to Asia, White House aides were studying the political videotapes to see where they had lost control of events. Among those at fault, they decided, was GOP Sen. Bill Frist, outmaneuvered early this month by the Democrats' Harry Reid, who used a parliamentary trick to force the Senate into a secret session and demand answers on WMD issues. But White House aides concede that they, too, were at fault for having assumed that Bush was personally unassailable and that events—and explanations of them—would take care of themselves. A war-room defense was "something we did well during the campaign," said Nicolle Wallace, Bush's communications director. "Maybe incorrectly, we had hoped or presumed that wouldn't be necessary after the election."They don't have a message to convey because they don't have a policy. And, they have a traitor running their spin control -- challenging the patriotism of anyone who speaks out against them. Any president who actually cared about national security would have thrown Rove in jail for outing a spy during wartime.
It is. The war room now is back, staffed with many of the same people who ran it in 2004, led by the Boy Genius himself, Karl Rove. To answer the charges that Bush "deliberately misled" the country on WMD, the White House is arguing that most Democrats—and most U.N. officials and European intelligence agencies—thought Saddam had WMD, too. Bush aides argue that Democrats saw the same intel and came to the same conclusions Bush did (an assertion Democrats hotly dispute). "We recognized that we can't communicate our message effectively until we deal with this," said a top White House aide.
Murtha said repeatedly that the American people are way ahead of the politicians when it comes to Iraq. He's right about that. But the Bush team believes they can spin themselves out of anything. No policy needed, just smear politics. Even some of the MSM seem to be on to their game this time.
