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RALEIGH | Former House Speaker Jim Black pleaded guilty Thursday afternoon to accepting $25,000 in illegal cash payments between February 2002 and December 2005 from chiropractors in exchange for pushing legislation they sought.
Now if they would just throw his sorry ass into prison and be done with him.
You just have to love a press briefing with Tony Snow! I now know why the Bush Crime Family picked this idiot to be their mouthpiece to the press. It had to be for the comic relief!
At the briefing today:
Q Slides from a pre-war briefing show that by this point, the U.S. expected that the Iraqi army would be able to stabilize the country and there would be as few as 5,000 U.S. troops there. What went wrong?
MR. SNOW: I'm not sure anything went wrong. At the beginning of the Civil War, people thought it would all be over at Manassas. It is very difficult -- no, Jessica, the fact is, a war is a big, complex thing. And what you're talking about is a 2002 assessment. We're now in the year 2007, and it is well-known by anybody who has studied any war that war plans immediately become moot upon the first contact with the enemy.
Q But this estimate was monumentally wrong. So would the President, knowing what he knows today, still have decided to go into Iraq?
MR. SNOW: Yes. The President believes that we did the right thing in going into Iraq. The question is, should you saddle any military planner with an expectation that they're going to have perfect insight into what happens five years later? Aand the answer is, of course not. And I think if you talk to military planners, they do their very best under a situation. As you know, many reporters who were in the field then probably had different views about how things might be today.
Q Tony, the President has said repeatedly that he is not satisfied with the situation in Iraq. Given those numbers he outlined today in Afghanistan -- the number of roadside bombs doubled, direct attacks increased three times, suicide bombs increased five-fold -- is he satisfied with the situation in Afghanistan?
What the President understands is that groups, like the Taliban and al Qaeda, are going to do whatever they can. They're going to do their best to use terror as a way of preventing democracy from flourishing in Afghanistan and Iraq. And it is the commitment of allies in both countries, along with the host government, and increasingly -- again, you heard today, building greater capacity on the part of the host government, to make sure that they've got the ability, ultimately, to stand on their own.
