Flutterby™! : Imminent Threat

Yeehaw! Lyn over at Medley has an entry which discusses this text version of this CBS transcript of Donald Rumsfeld caught lying. Remember when certain apologists were getting by with the "they never actually said 'imminent threat'"? Well, if the phrase isn't exactly contained in:

some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent, that Saddam is at least five to seven years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain.

And

No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world and the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

You'd have to be the worst sort of postmodernist weasel to assert that the semantic meaning wasn't the same.

Something else that strikes me here... I've tried to stay away from the comparisons with Weimar Berlin, because I think that's a little outlandish. After all, Hitler waited for several years to unnecessarily open up a second front.

(Now, shall we go into all of the conservatives praising the Taliban in the late '90s? The cites are out there...)