Toe to toe WMD rhetoric: We must counter Kay's "report" with firepower!

[jsaro]

There's lots of buzz in the left-leaning blogosphere about the possible effect of David Kay's upcoming "report" on WMDs. Now, really, we all know that whatever Mr. Kay comes up with will be a well-orchestrated, focus-grouped, no-holds-barred, PNAC-approved, supremely propagandistic stink bomb aimed at countering the Left's assault on the flimsy WMD-based rush to invasion.

No doubt.

The SCLM will trumpet it to the HILT, because the Kobe Bryant proscuetion is too slow for most peoples' tastes. And Scott Peterson is slipping into obscurity! What else have they got, for Chrissakes??? Not enough shark attacks, blond-white-girl abductions, or celebrity murders to lift the torpor!

Dammit, the Left must be ready to blast back IMMEDIATELY with talking points, talking heads, press releases, ads, whatever, to counteract this propaganda. Any of you readers who work for members of Congress, or DLC types, heed my words!!! August is a slow news month!!! Take your vacations in December!!! We must counter this ASAP, and we don't even yet know what he is going to say!!!

I am not given to alarmism, but I think this particular issue is extremely important in the fight to weaken Li'l Caesar's credibility, which is his only strong point, if he has one (poor schmuck!).

[JackSwift]

1. That's why they are going to release it all at once

so that the volume of crap can make up for the lack of quality of the evidence. It will take longer to confirm it that way. It is now quite apparent that they were making up all the supposedly "secret" evidence they had. It was no better than Nixon's "secret plan" to end the war. They are just full of shit, from start to end.


They way to deal with this more massive volume is to find the errors and hammer them even more on the lack of accuracy. After all, they had substantially more time to check the accuracy, so it should be 100 percent with sober interpretation of the evidence.

[sandnsea]

2. Concede the weapons programs

A preemptive strike as it were. Take away the power of their report by conceding it before it's given. There's a term for this but it alludes me at the moment.

We know he had weapons programs in the 80s. We know he was maneuvering to try and keep them in the 90s. What we don't know is what he had in 2003 that required a preemptive war. Did he have weapons that could be launched in 45 minutes? Did he have stockpiles of chem/bio weapons? Was he reconstituting a nuclear program? Was he working to give terrorists actual weapons? These are the things which led Americans to believe a war was necessary.

Pin down the questions and make them the focus. Any report about paperwork, especially if it points to the 80's and 90's, becomes an embarrassment, not an answer.

[imhotep]

3. It should be easy to refute

1. The authorization of force was not contigent upon a "Weapons program," it was supposed to be an immediate threat.(most important)
2. We already knew there was a program and even so, there is no way to produce significant quantities of enriched uranium without anyone knowing about it. (All of the material has been accounted for)
3. There is still no coherent plan for rebuilding and managing Iraq, with our soldiers still dying every day.

However, I am 100% sure Democrats will fuck this up like usual.

[whoYaCallinAlib]

4. It will be easy to discredit . . .but will anybody listen?

The difficulty will be controlling the RW spin so that a majority of Americans won't think it contains more "proof of WMD" than it really does.

[jsaro]

5. A swift, loud rebuttal is vital

I believe that the unease of the public is very high because of all the administration's well-publicized lies and the fact that soldiers keep dying in Iraq. People WANT to believe that Li'l Caesar was right about invading Iraq. That's one reason the media has hyped every tiny bit of "evidence" that Iraq had WMDs. BushCo scared the bejeebus out of everyone, and most people do not want to believe that they were snookered into agreeing to a war where Americans keep getting killed for no apparent useful end (except "freeing" the Iraqi people, which is a noble and worthy goal, and I hope it actually happens that way).

So the pump is primed for a massive hype-o-rama of unmatched volume when Kay's "report" comes out. Remember Ken Starr's "report"? Just like that. It will be online within MINUTES, I predict. It will give zillions of uneasy folks a hook to hang their pro-war, pro-Bush hats on. It will serve an important psychological function for those who desperately want to believe that their fear of Iraq and their support of the invasion was justified.

There's not too much anyone can do to prevent this sort of self-soothing by a lot of people, but it is imperative that those who know that the Kay "report" is a propagandistic tool to evoke exactly that response must scream loudly and immediately. Lest it take on the air of absolute truth.

(edit -- spelling)