"Bob Woodward has misled the nation! In the run-up to the publication of his new book, Plan of Attack, he sexed up his own intelligence findings! Quick, convene a panel at the Columbia Journalism School!" writes a John Podhoretz obviously reveling in the mastery of his craft in the New York Post:
How did Woodward deceive the audience of "60 Minutes" and the entire press corps? He made people believe Plan of Attack rivaled Richard Clarke's bestseller in Bush-bashing -- by pulling out a few isolated sentences from the book's endless 465 pages to make it appear as though Plan were a startling indictment of the war in Iraq.
Plan of Attack is indeed a startling book -- startling because it offers a persuasive portrait of an extraordinarily serious Bush administration and the 17-month process that led to the war . . .
If the Air America talk-show hosts and their ilk actually do plow through the 465 pages of Plan of Attack (which is a fate I would actually wish on them, because reading Woodward's sludge-like prose is an agonizing experience on a par with being forced to read a 465-page stereo-assembly manual), they are bound not only to be disappointed, but enraged at the way it explodes the myths and reveals the distortions they have been trying to foist on the American people.
This comes through most clearly in the sections about Iraq's missing or destroyed weapons of mass destruction. The conviction that Saddam possessed stockpiles of those weapons and was prepared to use them pervades and permeates the book. No honest person could come away from Plan of Attack thinking that George W. Bush didn't believe the weapons existed.
[via Lucianne]
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