Just a passing thought

Atrios has a nice excerpt from Donald Rumsfeld's appearance on Face the Nation on Sunday, showing Mr. "We may still find banned weapons in Iraq" reduced to a stuttering boob after claiming that no one in the administration had said Iraq was an "immediate" threat only to be faced with a quote where he said exactly that.

Sometimes I wonder, though, if instead of playing these stupid parsing games we should respond to claims that "we never said it was imminent" by just saying "of course you did" and then letting them stew in it, focusing instead on the fact that the more they distance themselves from terms like "imminent" and "immediate" the weaker their own case for the war becomes. That is, by their own words they are undermining their own previous arguments.

The war was, after all, supposedly a response to a "grave and gathering threat." But if the supposed threat, even if "gathering," wasn't "immediate," why couldn't we - for example - wait as inspections continued for a few more months, as Hans Blix said the inspectors needed? What was the rush?

Just askin'.

Correction: It appears i misread the excerpt; the quote that flustered Rumsfeld seems to have come from Vice President Cheney, not Rumsfeld himself.