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SCATOLOGICAL DISCOURSE. It was a big news day for excrement, yesterday was, what with the President's reference to what the Syrians were doing, followed by Joe Wilson's performance last night on "Countdown with Keith Olbermann." Speaking of the famous 16 words in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address that set off the chain of events that led to the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, her husband, a former ambassador to Iraq, explained his view of those events.
AMBASSADOR JOSEPH C. WILSON IV: �Getting the facts out did not include getting the National Intelligence Officers' letter out, which was circulated around the administration in January, representing the consensus view of the American intelligence community that the Niger claim was, quote, baseless. Those were not the facts they were getting out. The stuff they were getting out was just basically [PAUSE] crap, for want of a better word...[Emphasis added]OLBERMANN: An appropriate turn of phrase on this day that we played the clip of the president at the G-8 summit.I must say, that as a Jersey girl, I am flummoxed that the utterance of one of the more benign curse words in American English has made such news, even if it did come out of the President's mouth. I mean, if you ask Newt Gingrich, we're in the middle of World War III. Is that not bigger news?And speaking of Gingrich, am I the only one who found it odd that he was chosen to represent the Republican view of the conflict in the Middle East on Sunday's "Meet the Press," opposite Sen. Joseph Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee? Were no GOP committee members available? Did Newt select himself, or did the party anoint him to hold forth?
--Adele M. Stan