July 15, 2003
Fleischer gone, celebrates with yellow cake
Ari Fleischer, the ignoble wall of half-truths, deflections and turn-arounds who has served as the White House press secretary and after his 300th briefing, officially called it quits. His replacement is Scott McClellan. With the recent growing scandal surrounding WMDs and yellow-cake uranium, the adieu was not a triumphant cake walk as he would have liked, with reporters asking some critical questions:
“Why don’t you simply retract and withdraw the statement?”Fleischer’s reponse? “I think the burden is on those people who think he didn’t have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are.” That’s certainly an apt decription of America’s new style of justice.
“What’s the burden of proof here?”
“If there’s so much uncertainty about this information … why go through all these hoops to include it?”
“You’re trying to have it both ways.”
At the end of the briefing: “Bob Deans of Cox News Service rose to say that he had brought Fleischer a cake. ‘We’ve received assurances that it’s not yellow cake,’ Deans said. ‘But that doesn’t prove that it’s not yellow cake.’”
Well Ari, I guess you can’t eat your yellow cake and have it too.
Posted by Stephen VanDyke at July 15, 2003 11:08 AMThe fallacy of Ari’s is response is that he requires doubters to prove the negative. It is not possible to prove the negative. It is possible to prove that Iraq had WMD, find them and parade them. But, as Hans Blix pointed out, one can never prove there weren’t WMD, because if they were destroyed, there is nothing to produce. The burden of proof here, is clearly on the administration, and the media has wised up to the “Prove there weren’t any” Whitehouse ploy. Any high school debate member could handle Ari.
Posted by: DRRemer at July 17, 2003 01:31 AMI could find no mention of a significant lie on Sunday’s Meet the Press. The Republican Speaker of the House. stated that we knew about the whereabouts of hundreds of drums of Yellow Cake PLUTONIUM. There is no such thing as yellow cake plutonium. Plutonium is not a naturally occuring element and is manufactured in the core of a nuclear reactor where it occurs as one of the products of fission. Yellow cake is a rather stable form of uranium produced from the mining of uranium ore. It is dangerous only when injested or inhaled. It is low enough in radioactivity (has long half life) that it would make a very ineffective dirty bomb. Plutonium is however a word that strikes fear in the hearts of most people. A piece the size of a grape fuit can create a Nagasaki size weapon. The Republicans continue to lie and are not called on it.
Posted by: John Hall at July 22, 2003 11:37 AM
