Was there a woodshed involved?

I can't help but wonder if someone shall we say "explained" things to Tom Kean in the wake of his statements on Wednesday that 9/11 didn't have to happen.

Washington, December 18 - The chairman of a federal commission looking into the Sept. 11 attacks said Thursday that mistakes over many years left the United States vulnerable to such an attack, but he resisted pinning blame on either of the last two presidential teams.

"We have no evidence that anybody high in the Clinton administration or the Bush administration did anything wrong," chairman Thomas Kean said in an interview with ABC's "Nightline" taped for airing Thursday night.

Yeah, well, maybe, but it seems to me that Kean is too smart and experienced a politician to have been so unaware of the implication of his words. Howard Dean may have a reputation for doing that, but Tom Kean doesn't. We'll have to see how this plays out.

Long sidebar: Longer than the post, in fact.

Speaking of Dean, I think the big splash being made about his offhand reference during an NPR interview to the idea that the Shrub team was tipped in advance to 9/11 by the Saudis is not even making a mountain out of a molehill - 'cause there ain't even a molehill here.

This was the actual exchange, from the Diane Rehm show for December 1. (Via Spinsanity, of which more below.)

DEAN: There is a report, which the president is suppressing evidence for, which is a thorough investigation of 9/11.

REHM: Why do you think he's suppressing that report?

DEAN: I don't know. There are many theories about it. The most interesting theory that I've heard so far, which is nothing more than a theory, I can't - think it can't be proved, is that he was warned ahead of time by the Saudis. Now, who knows what the real situation is, but the trouble is by suppressing that kind of information, you lead to those kinds of theories, whether they have any truth to them or not, and then eventually they get repeated as fact. So I think the president is taking a great risk by suppressing the clear - the key information that needs to go to the Kean commission.

Note that Dean called the idea "nothing more than a theory" which can't be proved, presenting it as the kind of notions that get promoted by stonewalling. That, however, didn't prevent subsequent interviewers from jumping on the word "interesting" and some commentators even argued the word implied an endorsement of the claim even as Dean continued to say he didn't believe it. Perhaps the worst of these was Spinsanity, which claimed that

Dean tried to have it both ways, promulgating an unknown and unproven theory while not taking responsibility for it. Indeed, he blamed Bush for the emergence of such theories even as he repeats one himself.

It's hard to know where to begin disentangling this mess of illogic. First, it has to be noted that Dean's wound is self-inflicted. If he'd used words like "most outlandish" or "oddest" rather than "most interesting," this likely wouldn't have been a big deal. But to hear Spinsanity tell it, the adjective doesn't matter, because simply by mentioning the idea he's promoting it and disclaimers of disbelief become a matter of trying to have it both ways. By that "logic," it becomes impossible to mention any idea with which you disagree without becoming a hypocrite, "promulgating a theory while not taking responsibility for it."

It gets worse. On December 7, on "Fox News Sunday," Dean was asked about his statement to Rehm and did he believe the theory about the Saudis. Dean responded "No, I don't believe that. I can't imagine the president of the United States doing that." Two days later, at the Democratic presidential debate, he was asked about it again, this time by a reporter who claimed he "had once stated that you thought it was possible that the president of the United States had been forewarned about the 9/11 terrorist attacks."

Dean replied in part by pointing to his specific denial on Fox. That, however, was not good enough for Spinsanity, which accused him of having "blatantly dissembled." The basis for this was that "he did not include such an explicit caveat during his original appearance on Rehm's show." Of course, Rehm never asked him if he believed it, apparently regarding what he did say as sufficient disavowal - as, in fact, should anyone not working off the RNC playbook. Is Spinsanity suggesting Dean would have given a different answer than he gave on Fox if she had asked the question? If not, the whole "dissembling" argument collapses.

Taking one last stab at it, Spinsanity ends up with this:

Notably, when Vice President Dick Cheney employed a similar tactic in September, suggesting that Iraq may have been connected to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks without presenting any evidence of such a connection, Dean slammed Cheney and one of his foreign policy advisors told the Boston Globe that it is "totally inappropriate for the vice president to continue making these allegations without bringing forward" proof.

However, in the very interview to which Spinsanity links, Cheney doesn't say that a suggestion of links between Iraq and al-Qaeda are an "interesting theory but I don't believe it," he - while mixing in a couple of pro forma "we don't know"s - claims a variety of reasons why people should believe it, several of which have been shown to be patently false. This was far from the first time he or another member of the administration had made such assertions - and it came after Shrub had said there was no evidence of such a connection. There is simply no comparison between the two incidents.

Spinsanity is doing a hell of a lot of spinning of its own.

This does not, by the way, mean Spinsanity is some right-wing nutso site; it has, for example, effectively skewered Ann Coulter. But put together with the rest of its work, it does mean that Spinsanity appears to be based on the conviction that everyone - other than Spinsanity, of course - is a conniving liar just waiting to be roasted. And that can lead to finding hypocrisy and dissembling where a calm look even by a non-supporter of the target (and remember, I'm not a Dean supporter by any means; I'm a Green who voted for Nader in 2000 and is rooting for Kucinich among the Democrats) shows that there's no "there" there.