The time of the lie

"Iraq must disarm.

And for the sake of peace, we will lead a coalition of the willing to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction."

George W. Bush has told us this lie about a million times.

In his address at the United Nations, in his SOFU address, at stumps for Republican Congressional candidates, he thumped the lecturn for emphasis--Iraq*thump*must*thump*disarm*thump*--as he repeated the lie, over and over and over.

This statement--this lie-- was the pretext for invasion. Not mass graves. Not "brutal dictatorship".

Iraq repeatedly denied having WMD, the inspectors found none, yet the President insisted....

This lie is MUCH MORE SERIOUS than "I did not have sexual relations..."

Bush lied, and people died.

Today, and every day from now until Election Day, I am going to repeat Bush's lie--to people I see, on boards that I post.

Please do the same.

If you do, they will be defeated.

The selective hearing that applies to Bush supporters is like a Berlin wall of the mind. No sane thought crosses over without getting shot at.

The Wall fell, ed.

Remember? And not any 'one brick at atime'.

Several bricks at a time.

Whole sections at once.

EB: I love the way your mind works. Please tell me that was original! Wow .

It was me, all right. Thanks.


PDiddie
One of my recurrent themes is, the US was very similar to its current state before the Great Depression. The one difference, of course, being the loose cannon that is the G Bush administration. It took a Great Depression and WW II to bring Americans to a state in which they recognized the value of a New Deal. I don't know what can shake the public of today from its torpor. I truly am at a loss.

EB: well, it's looking like Great Depression II is fast approaching but WWIII won't be headed by any FDR and so we need to find a candidate ASAP and get behind her/him w/o the usual factional squabbling or republican dirty tricks . . . and then I wake up.

All I want is some hope, just gimme some hope (w/apologies to J. Lennon).

Dead for a Lie by Mike McArdle

I didn't know Kirk Straseskie, in fact my only contact with him was reading a newspaper article about his death. Straseskie was a Marine who was killed in Iraq on May 19th of this year. He drowned after leaping into a canal to save four fellow Marines whose helicopter had crashed. By the time Straseskie was killed the newspapers and embedded reporters were on their way home. The staged-managed tearing down of the Hussein statue was just a memory. The little man who had started the war had taken his dress-up victory lap on the USS Abraham Lincoln and had film in the can for his reelection effort next year. The 24/7 cable news channels had moved on to Laci Peterson.

So not much attention was paid to Kirk Straseskie's death. The war is perceived as being over and the fate of the new casualties only resonates in hometowns like Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, where Straseskie grew up.

Straseskie and the other Marines that he tried to save probably didn't ask a lot of questions about why they were in Iraq. A good serviceman follows orders and leaves the larger decisions for others. They had more than enough to occupy them without dwelling on the political issues that surrounded the war.

But Straseskie's father had seen enough of the war to know that Iraq did not and in fact had never posed any threat to the United States, as the President had claimed. John Straseskie, who served in the Army and National Guard for 26 years, expressed anger at the loss of his son in a war that that he now thinks was sold under false pretenses. "He put our troops over there to finish what his dad didn't do. They found no weapons of mass destruction," he told the Capital Times, a Madison, WI newspaper.

Now, far too late to save to save Kirk Straseskie or console his father, the press and the intelligence community have begun to wake up to the fact that they and the American people were deceived. We're finding out that Colin Powell denounced some of the claims about Iraqi weapons as "bullshit" before his speech to the UN in February. A newly formed group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity wrote a letter to the President protesting "a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions." An Army intelligence officer told Time Magazine that Donald Rumsfeld was "deeply, almost pathologically, distorting the intelligence". Greg Thielmann, recently retired from the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research says that the Bush administration "was grossly distorting the intelligence" on both weapons and the Iraq-Al Qaida connection.

Kirk Straseskie will never have children or find his life's work or be able to comfort his parents as they grow older. His life was ended sixty years prematurely because of a lie told by his government, the government that he volunteered to fight for. He almost certainly went to his death believing that he was in Iraq to defend Americans when it is now obvious that he was not.

Tony Blair in England will now face a parliamentary inquiry on why the rationale for the war now appears to have been false and U.S. Senate committees are at least talking about pursuing their own investigation. But the gravity and result of the deception demands a lot more than that.

If this administration cherry-picked the intelligence data or ignored the real data in order to justify a pre-ordained conclusion, then they murdered Kirk Straseskie and the four other Marines that he tried to save, and dozens of other U.S. soldiers. And they also murdered a few thousand Iraqi civilians who in the absence of weapons have become the back-up excuse for the war (we had to go to war now to "liberate" the Iraqis).

If they sent human beings into harm's way under false pretenses then they have committed a crime, a crime against America, a crime against Iraq, a crime against humanity. And if there were real justice in the world then Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz would be placed on trial, not here, but in The Hague where the international law that they have expressed such utter contempt for is enforced.

Colin Powell? He should receive a worse punishment. He should have to go to Beaver Dam, Wisconsin and explain to fellow vet John Straseskie why he helped send Straseskie's son to his death for "bullshit."

<THUD>

Even David Broder is starting to get it.

Bush sounds sincere--but he lies like a rug.

Broder describes the bait:



Then the switch:



Remember when the Administration "forgot" to budget for Afghani reconstruction?

Standard operating procedure for these guys.

Like falling off the scooter; aWol wants the photo op bad, but when it comes time to find the "on" switch, he gets a little, well, clumsy.

Then again, maybe we don't want him to get comfortable with pushing buttons....

I am am member of the Irish Roman Catholud Apostolic Church... because I was born to it. Mike and his Mom lived in Texas too long... Y
all are texas toast... we hate you!

um?

While we wait for Green Eyes to return and explain whatever that mini-screed up there means, here's another example of administration prevarication:

Report by EPA Leaves Out Data on Climate Change

The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to publish a draft report next week on the state of the environment, but after editing by the White House, a long section describing risks from rising global temperatures has been whittled to a few noncommittal paragraphs.

* * *

Among the deletions were conclusions about the likely human contribution to warming from a 2001 report on climate by the National Research Council that the White House had commissioned and that President Bush had endorsed in speeches that year. White House officials also deleted a reference to a 1999 study showing that global temperatures had risen sharply in the previous decade compared with the last 1,000 years. In its place, administration officials added a reference to a new study, partly financed by the American Petroleum Institute, questioning that conclusion.

In the end, E.P.A. staff members, after discussions with administration officials, said they decided to delete the entire discussion to avoid criticism that they were selectively filtering science to suit policy.

Now....hasn't this horseshit gone on long enough?

Who were the "administration officials"?

Also, "Who put that student's thesis in the British report?" And "Who put the Niger-uranium line in the State of the Union speech?"

Get crackin', all you reporters. There are Pulitzers in the pipeline.

The Republican leader in the Senate said that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was not the main justification for the US-led invasion of Iraq.

"I'm not sure that's the major reason we went to war," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist told NBC's Today Show.

Hmmmmmmmm................


"I am absolutely convinced, based on the information that's been given to me, that the weapon of mass destruction which can kill more people than an atomic bomb -- that is, biological weapons -- is in the hands of the leadership of Iraq."
Bill Frist
MSNBC Interview
January 10, 2003

"What is unique about Iraq compared to, I would argue, any other country in the world, in this juncture, is the exhaustion of diplomacy thus far, and, No. 2, this intersection of weapons of mass destruction."
Bill Frist
NewsHour Interview
January 22, 2003

"Iraq is a grave threat to this nation. It desires to acquire and use weapons of mass terror and is run by a despot with a proven record of willingness to use them. Iraq has had 12 years to comply with UN requirements for disarmament and has failed to do so. The president is right to say its time has run out."
Bill Frist
Press Release
January 28, 2003

Let there be no mistake about our nation's purpose in confronting Iraq: Saddam Hussein's regime poses a clear threat to the people of United States, its friends and its allies, and it is a threat that we must address now."
Bill Frist
Senate Speech
March 7, 2003

"Getting rid of Saddam Hussein's regime is our best inoculation. Destroying once and for all his weapons of disease and death is a vaccination for the world."
Dr. Bill Frist
Washington Post op-ed
March 16, 2003

The United States . . . is now at war "so we will not ever see" what terrorists could do "if supplied with weapons of mass destruction by Saddam Hussein."
Bill Frist
Senate Debate
March 20, 2003

"We simply cannot live in fear of a ruthless dictator, aggressor and terrorist such as Saddam Hussein, who possesses the world's most deadly weapons."
Bill Frist
Speech to American Israel Political Action Committee
March 31, 2003

"I am not eager to send young Americans into harm's way in Iraq, or to see innocent people killed or hurt in military operations. Given all of the facts and circumstances known to us, however, I am convinced that if we wait, a threat will continue to materialize in Iraq that could cause incalculable damage to world peace in general, and to the United States in particular."
Bill Frist
Letter to Future of Freedom Foundation
March, 2003

I would say that Frist, physician and majority leader, has officially earned an honorary doctorate in Revisionism from Rush Limbaugh's College of Advanced Conservative Studies.

Laugh along with Ari:

"Just because something didn't make it to the level where it should have been included in a presidential speech, in hindsight, doesn't mean the information was necessarily inaccurate," Mr. Fleischer said.

ha ha

"I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are."

ha ha HA

NYT Online

Didn't Ari resign? So, when does it become effective?

Guerrillas in the MistMaj. Gen. Buford Blount III
May 27, 2003

I believe these are local attacks. I don't see it on a national level.
Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan
June 4, 2003

We do not see signs of central command and control direction . . . these are groups that are organized, but they're small; they may be five or six men conducting isolated attacks against our soldiers.
L. Paul Bremer
June 12, 2003

This is not guerrilla warfare; it is not close to guerrilla warfare because it's not coordinated, it's not organized, and it's not led.
Major General Ray Odierno
June 18, 2003

There's a guerrilla war there but we can win it.
Paul Wolfowitz
Testimony before the House Armed Services Committee
June 18, 2003

Dangerous pockets of the old regime remain loyal to it and they, along with their terrorist allies, are behind deadly attacks designed to kill and intimidate coalition forces and innocent Iraqis.
George W. Bush
Radio Address
June 21, 2003

It's just weird. It's totally unconventional. It's guerrilla warfare.
Capt. Burris Wollsieffer
June 23, 2003

I think it is worth emphasizing that these guys lack the two classical ingredients of a victory in a so-called guerrilla war if that's what you want to say they're conducting. They lack the sympathy of the population and they lack any serious source of external support.
Paul Wolfowitz
Washington Post Interview
June 26, 2003

Q: We've gone from a traditional, if you will, set of circumstances, rules of engagement, to more of a guerrilla war. Isn't that accurate?
Rumsfeld: I don't know that I would use the word.
Donald Rumsfeld
Press Interview (transcript DOD)
June 27, 2003

America has to understand that we've gone from a conventional war that ended May 1 to an unconventional war.
Centcom spokesman Capt. Jeff Fitzgibbons
Washington Post Interview
June 29, 2003

I guess the reason I don't use the phrase "guerrilla war" is because there isn't one, and it would be a misunderstanding and a miscommunication to you and to the people of the country and the world.
Donald Rumsfeld
Press Briefing (transcript DOD)
June 30, 2003

We have not been able to detect any sort of coordinated, synchronized, regional or national-level operations that have been conducted against us.
Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez
USA Today Interview
July 2, 2003

Q: Defense Secretary Rumsfeld says this is not a guerrilla war. How would the President describe it?
Fleischer: The President describes this as people who are loyal to the former regime still fighting American forces who are there, and in the process, they are becoming enemies of the Iraqi people.
Ari Fleischer
Press Briefing
July 2, 2003

(Attacks continue to plague coalition forces in Iraq, but Franks said he would not label them a "guerrilla effort" for two reasons:) "One, guerrilla and insurgency operations are supported by the people, and I've demonstrated to my own satisfaction that the people of Iraq do not support the violence that we're seeing right now."
Gen. Tommy Franks
Testimony Before the House Armed Services Committee
July 10, 2003

Q: How organized is the resistance?
Rumsfeld: There's a lot of debate in the intelligence community on that, and I guess the short answer is I don't know. I think it's very clear that it's coordinated in regions and areas, cities, in the north particularly. To what extent is it organized throughout the country, I think there isn't any conviction about that yet.
Donald Rumsfeld
NBC Meet the Press
July 13, 2003

People can call it what they want. I characterize it the way I just did, which is what's actually going on. I don't know that that's necessarily the correct definition of organized resistance or guerrilla war, but it doesn't make a lot of difference to me.
Donald Rumsfeld
ABC This Week
July 13, 2003

I believe there's mid-level Ba'athist, Iraqi intelligence service people, Special Security Organization people, Special Republican Guard people that have organized at the regional level in cellular structure and are conducting what I would describe as a classical guerrilla-type campaign against us.
Gen. John Abizaid, Centcom Commander
Pentagon Press Conference
July 16, 2003

The discussion about what type of conflict this is ... is almost beside the point ... It's worth kind of remembering that as we kind of have this almost kind of, you know, academic discussion, is it this or is it that.
Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita
Pentagon Press Conference
July 16, 2003

Never mind....

Disarming Iraq of its chemical and biological weapons and dismantling its nuclear weapons program is a crucial part of winning the War on Terror.
Paul Wolfowitz
Speech to the Council on Foreign Relations
January 23, 2003

I'm not concerned about weapons of mass destruction.
Paul Wolfowitz
Interview with Reporters
July 21, 2003

They've lied about everything so often that if they told a truth it would be almost impossible to believe them.

I think that anyone who believes something this administration says without carefully examining the facts (and refusing to believe if the facts are withheld) is losing it. Losing what? Well, intellectual integrity, touch with reality, and a large 50-state country that used to be known as the land of the free.