Judith Miller claims making stuff up is not the same as lying

I beg to differ. Making stuff up IS lying.



Check out her self-serving mea non-culpa; "Before the 2003 invasion, President Bush and other officials cited the intelligence community's incorrect conclusions about Saddam's WMD capabilities, and on occasion, went beyond them."



When you go beyond the conclusions provided by your intel community, correct or not, you're obviously making stuff up.



Not in Miller's world. Here's her next sentence; "But relying on the mistakes of others and errors of judgement are not the same as lying."



There you have it. Bush and Cheney and Colin Powell and Judith Miller and the NYT weren't lying about Saddam's WMDs after all...



They were just making stuff up.



Too bad about the collateral damage.

Saddam Hussein doppelganger Abdulla Ocalan calls for Kurd-Turk raprochment

Who does this guy remind you of?




That's  Abdullah Ocalan, boss of the Kurdish PKK party. He's been enjoying the hospitality of the Turkish state since 1999.

But does he not bear a startling resemblance to this guy?



And you know what we know about guys that look like that, don't you?

We just can't trust them!

The wily Saddam hid his weapons of mass destruction so well that we never did find them. Talk about a sneaky bastard!

So now we're supposed to trust a Kurd who looks just like an Arab?

Why are despots and tyrants not afraid to mingle with their own people?

The picture of Iranian leader Hassan Rouhani out for a hike, and the story behind it, reminds the casual western reader that our enemies have a different sort of relationship to their people than what we have here.

When is the last time an American president casually mingled with fellow hikers on an impromptu excursion into the hills? Not in living memory. Even the most mundane foray into the public sphere by Obama, or Bush or Clinton before him, is a massive security operation.

What's different about the "despots" is that they don't appear to be afraid of their people, whereas in America, the leaders are absolutely paranoid of unscripted spontaneous interactions with citizens.

Just before Saddam went to ground after the US invasion he was seen addressing a cheering and heavily armed mob. He was standing on the roof of a car as he gave them a pep talk. No American president would take that kind of chance.

Same with Gaddafi.  Sure there were people in Libya who didn't like him, but were it not for NATO air power those people would have held their tongues and held their fire indefinitely. The Libyans were a cultured, well educated, well informed people. By and large they knew things could be a lot worse, as subsequent events have shown.

So perhaps the trope of the "hated tyrant" is just that; a propaganda construct designed to placate the few who might ask questions here in our democratic utopias.

Things are not what they seem...