Exchange with Joshua Marshall about Joseph Wilson

From the start of the Joseph Wilson affair last year it was obvious that he was a ridiculous liar, and I couldn’t believe that all that fuss was being made about such palpable falsities, except as a further expression of the hate-Bush syndrome that has deranged the left. I had a long e-mail exchange last fall with one of Wilson’s most vocal champions, liberal blogger Joshua Marshall, of which the main portion is below. We had been discussing other topics, then segued to the subject of Wilson:

LA to Joshua Marshal
11:55 AM 11/12/2003

Joshua,

We clearly have very different notions of what is “serious.” You evidently regard Joseph Wilson’s fraudulent attack on the administration (a narcissistic hit job that didn’t even make sense in its own terms) as something serious that must be looked into.

Basically, you give credence to the liberal “storm of the week”, i.e., whatever the latest hysteria-inducing lie the Dems come up with, which, as soon as it is discredited, they just move on to the next one.

Hey, Joshua, why not call for a congressional investigation of how our forces allowed all of Iraq’s antiquities to be plundered? And what about the way the whole war was a “fraud cooked up in Texas,” when the war was really about Israel—or was it oil, or was it W.’s need to prove his manhood, or was it revenge for his Pa? These are probably the sorts of “serious” things you think call for a full investigation.

JM to LA
November 12, 2003 6:57 p.m.

Lawrence, dream on. if you think wilson’s was a fraudulent attack you’re really too far gone. i suspect you just don’t know many of the facts of the case. jmm

LA to JM
07:13 PM 11/12/2003

Wilson’s was a fraudulent argument on the face of it. Wilson said he determined (over what he described as eight days of cups of sweet tea in his hotel, showing his seriousness as a gatherer of intelligence) that Iraq had not PURCHASED uranium from NIGER. But Bush’s statement was that British intelligence had determined that Iraq had ATTEMPTED to purchase uranium from AFRICA. Wilson’s finding did not at all contradict Bush statement. Yet this narcissistic Bush hater made it SEEM as if it did, and a lot of dumb bunnies and Dems stoked up that “storm” for all it was worth, until its emptiness started to become apparent.

JM to LA
11/12/03 7:30 p.m.

what you’re saying simply isn’t true. he didn’t imply anything in the way you describe. and the story he told, and the repeated efforts to get a discredited story into the president’s speeches is an extremely important issue that we haven’t heard the last of.

LA to JM
11/12/03 8:01 p.m.

From Wilson’s July 6 New York Times op-ed hit job:

“It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place… Given the structure of the consortiums that operated the mines, it would be exceedingly difficult for Niger to transfer uranium to Iraq.”

“Then, in January, President Bush, citing the British dossier, repeated the charges about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from Africa…. The next day, I reminded a friend at the State Department of my trip and suggested that if the president had been referring to Niger, then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them. He replied that perhaps the president was speaking about one of the other three African countries that produce uranium: Gabon, South Africa or Namibia. At the time, I accepted the explanation. I didn’t know that in December, a month before the president’s address, the State Department had published a fact sheet that mentioned the Niger case…. Those are the facts surrounding my efforts.”

The fact that the a “month before the president’s address, the State Department had published a fact sheet that mentioned the Niger case,” does not lead to the conclusion that when the President said “Africa” he meant only and exclusively Niger. There is no necessary connection between this unspecified fact sheet and the president’s speech. So, there’s no there there. Also, Bush spoke about “Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from Africa.” Not about a successful purchase of uranium from Africa.

So, Wilson’s finding in no way contradicted Bush’s statement. Are you going to say once again that this “simply isn’t true”?

By the way, what do you think of the character and credibility of a person who carries out a high priority intelligence mission for his country, and then, because he dislikes the country’s ensuing policies, publishes a self-touting newspaper column revealing his own secret mission?

JM to LA
11/12/03 8:04 p.m.

it wasn’t a secret mission in the sense you imply. and the issue was that he had seen the administration bend over backwards to use discredited intel. so yes i think it was good he did what he did.

LA to JM
11/12/03 9:27 p.m.

Have you conceded the point that Wilson’s finding did not disprove Bush’s statement?

JM to LA
11/12/03 8:32 p.m.

this is a silly point. they were basing the statement on the documents.

it was clear by that point the alleged sale noted in the documents was bogus—in part because of wilson’s investigation. you’re hanging your argument on a fastidious legalism.

LA to JM
11/12/03 9:41 p.m.

And you’re hanging by a non-existent thread. As you perfectly well know, Bush’s statement that Wilson attacked was not based on the document that everyone later admitted was fraudulent, but on a different, British finding that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium in Africa.

A few e-mails back, you spoke with complete dismissiveness, as though only a dummy could believe it, of my point that Wilson’s finding did not contradict Bush’s statement. Yet now you’re thrashing around trying to avoid admitting the plain truth of that point.

Then after Marshall went into details that I conceded I didn’t know about, I concluded:

LA to JM
11/12/03 10:24 p.m.

While I will look up your other stuff at some point I just want to make clear that, in terms of the actual topic of this discussion between us, i.e., Wilson’s op-ed, my point stands. Wilson’s indictment against Bush is fraudulent on its face.

Now there may be other issues here that you’d like to bring forward that to your mind prove that in the larger picture Wilson is right. But in terms of his actual op-ed and the statements clearly made in it, what he found in Niger did not contradict what the president said in his speech.

A bit later on, my e-mail exchanges with Marshall virtually stopped after I had described Wesley Clark as a “certifiable psycho” and Marshall described my attitude as “toxic,” and I replied that Marshall was a “mere Democratic partisan.” But on March 10, 2004, I wrote to Marshall:

I just checked out your site today and it confirms in spades what I said to you a few weeks ago, that you are simply a committed Democratic Party partisan who will use ANY argument if in your mind it makes Democrats look better and Republicans look worse. Consider the supposed example you give of a Bush “flip flop” regarding a second Security Council vote, which you would have your readers believe is as bad as Kerry’s flip flops on the war.

In fact, Bush’s conduct that you recount is the kind of thing that is basic to politics. A leader intends to do a certain thing, it turns out not to be viable, and he changes course. There is nothing dishonest or dishonorable about that. Yet you are so desperate for a moral equivalency between Bush and Kerry that you make Bush’s change of course on seeking that UN vote the moral equivalent of, e.g., Kerry’s voting FOR the war authorization and then not only changing his mind about it, but LYING about it and saying that the vote was only to give Bush the authority to “threaten” war, not the authority to make war. That is the biggest, most irresponsible lie by a major figure in national politics I’ve ever seen.

I don’t particularly care that you are a Total Democratic Partisan. What is objectionable is your facade of being a journalist looking for the truth of things. If you would just say, “I, Joshua Marshall, am a Total Democratic Partisan. I am a more intellectual version of James Carville,” then you would at least be honest about what you are.

That’s where it stood until the thorough discrediting of Wilson and his champions this past week by the Senate Intelligence Committee report, which has been well-covered in the non-mainstream liberal media ((here are just three of many articles on this). I couldn’t resist sending Marshall one more note about it:

Subject: The saga of Joe Wilson and you
Date: July 15,2004

As I said to you last year, you’re not a searcher of fact, you’re a committed partisan pretending to be a searcher of fact. You thought you could have it both ways but you can’t. And now you’ve exposed yourself for all the world to see.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 19, 2004 10:30 AM | Send