Via ThinkProgress:
Last night, during a contentious interview with Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell wondered if Saddam Hussein “was the same threat to New Yorkers that Osama bin Laden was.” With the obvious answer being, “No,” Rice had to come up with something. Similar to President Bush’s “You forgot Poland” line during the 2004 presidential debate, Rice said the threat from, and thus invasion of, Iraq was justified by the coalition Bush put together. O’Donnell noted that the so-called “coalition of the willing” didn’t exactly represent the full support of the international community, but in the fog of the interview’s back and forth, Rice just started adding countries that weren’t even part of the coalition:RICE: So the Georgians who went there and the Japanese who went there and others –O’DONNELL: Actually had soldiers firing weapons on the ground?
RICE: This was not part of the coalition. The people who — the British and the Australians and the Poles and all of those who —the Canadians, all of those who were ultimately in Iraq, these were not part of the coalition?
Canada, eh? Just one little problem with that:
After months of hesitation, Canada said Tuesday that it has no intention of contributing to a U.S.-led attack on Iraq that has not been endorsed by the U.N. Security Council.
I guess it's easy to win an argument when you can just make up your own facts. Or maybe the completely false claim that Canada was a member of the Coalition of the Willing just wasn't intended to be a factual statement.
See Vyan's recommended diary O'Donnell's Grilling of Condi Rice for further discussion.
