House of Eratosthenes

Seven years ago today, in a speech on the Iraq war, Sen. Ted Kennedy fired the first shot in an all-out assault on President George W. Bush’s integrity. “All the evidence points to the conclusion,” Kennedy said, that the Bush administration “put a spin on the intelligence and a spin on the truth.” Later that day Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle told reporters Mr. Bush needed “to be forthcoming” about the absence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Thus began a shameful episode in our political life whose poisonous fruits are still with us.

The next morning, Democratic presidential candidates John Kerry and John Edwards joined in. Sen. Kerry said, “It is time for a president who will face the truth and tell the truth.” Mr. Edwards chimed in, “The administration has a problem with the truth.”

The battering would continue, and it was a monument to hypocrisy and cynicism. All these Democrats had said, like Mr. Bush did, that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD. Of the 110 House and Senate Democrats who voted in October 2002 to authorize the use of force against his regime, 67 said in congressional debate that Saddam had these weapons. This didn’t keep Democrats from later alleging something they knew was false—that the president had lied America into war.

Senate Intelligence Chairman Bob Graham organized a bipartisan letter in December 2001 warning Mr. Bush that Saddam’s “biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs . . . may be back to pre-Gulf War status,” and enhanced by “longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies.” Yet two years later, he called for Mr. Bush’s impeachment for having said Saddam had WMD.

On July 9, 2004, Mr. Graham’s fellow Democrat on Senate Intelligence, Jay Rockefeller, charged that the Bush administration “at all levels . . . used bad information to bolster the case for war.” But in his remarks on Oct. 10, 2002, supporting the war resolution, he said that “Saddam’s existing biological and chemical weapons capabilities pose real threats to America.”

Even Kennedy, who opposed the war resolution, nonetheless said the month before the vote that Saddam’s “pursuit of lethal weapons of mass destruction cannot be tolerated.” But he warned if force were employed, the Iraqi dictator “may decide he has nothing to lose by using weapons of mass destruction himself or by sharing them with terrorists.”
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We know President Bush did not intentionally mislead the nation. Saddam Hussein was deposed and eventually hung for his crimes. Iraq is a democracy and an ally instead of an enemy of America. Al Qaeda suffered tremendous blows in the “land between the two rivers.” But Democrats lost more than the election in 2004. In telling lie after lie, week after week, many lost their honor and blackened their reputations.

History will eventually be cleaning up the mess here, I think. When Ted Kennedy expressed something, there was always this illusion hanging in the air that The Lion of the Senate was speaking for “everybody.” Change the personalities involved, change the voices, wait awhile, and then make the decision…it turns out all different. Because people aren’t too hung up on what was fashionable a handful of years before.

By the way, congratulations once again on your victory, Republican Senator Scott Brown.

But there won’t be any passionate, widespread rage — that’s the thing. Some purveyors of thought are hated and vilified. Like Titus Oates, Joe McCarthy and Susan Smith. They don’t have to affix their names to outright falsehoods — what they say can be technically true, and once it falls out of fashion they’ll still be excoriated. Crucified by a public enraged at themselves. This is what happened Bush & crew.

Being a left-winger means you never have to worry about it. You get to lie, and when the lie is discovered the hole thing just quietly slips down the memory hole. Al Sharpton can push his lies about Tawana Brawley as much as he wants, Mike Nifong can do the same thing with Crystal Gail Mangum. The courts & commissions & boards of review may impose consequences, but there will be no hate-fest, no burning of effigies.

The public’s funny that way.

But in this one, eventually we’re going to have to admit to what’s true and what isn’t.

Here’s something that is rather peculiar to me: People like me have been ignored consistently here. I say “like me” to refer to my own opinion, which can best be summed up as “pop Saddam like a zit, WMD or no, then get ready to bust a whole lot more.”

I’m not alone in thinking this. But there are a lot of other people who expressed support for the war on the mistaken assumption that these weapons were there. Okay, I get that. So it’s all about what motivates people to make the decisions they make, is that it? That’s what the anger is all about?

Then what about these foreign powers that sat on the United Nations Security Council, some with veto power, who were found after the invasion to be up to their eyebrows in Oil For Food money? Where’s the outrage about that?

It’s a legitimate question. Mr. Rove makes legitimate points. If the time hasn’t come to re-think all this by now, fine, someday it will be unavoidable. And the force involved is only going to increase with time, as we learn the hard way that war cannot be ended by legislation. It is a natural albeit tragic consequence of human interaction, it will always be around, and to affix it to the neck of some public figure in recent memory, as if this one individual is the only reason we have it, is patently absurd.

Although I suppose if you are looking for a singular scapegoat, Saddam Hussein would make just as much sense as anybody else.

Read that today. And I agree with the author, much to the shock of many of my friends, the leftier the more shocked.

I actually believe that Bush and Cheney and Rove are honorable men. Flawed, honorable men. Like a lot of people. Like, hopefully, me — and I’m specifically referring to the honorable part. The flawed part kinda goes witho
- philmon | 07/16/2010 @ 19:39
t saying. (danged touchpad mouse!)

I rest my case.
- philmon | 07/16/2010 @ 19:40
I think the whole “Bush lied, kids died” crap was just one more battle in a long war between the Right and the Left. It wasn’t the beginning, just a continuation.

I think what really got the ball rolling was the disputed 2000 presidential election. We were coming out of eight years of Clinton, easily the most polarizing president since Nixon, and a lot of us on the Right were eager to get the White House back and undo all the damage Billy Bob had done to our foreign policy. The Clinton-era foreign policy was extremely weak, as it is with Dear Reader…and all those years of apologizing and fucking-around had al-Qaeda convinced that the US wouldn’t respond militarily (at least meaningfully) to a major terrorist strike on American soil.

Of course, they gambled wrong. Once Bush had bombed the smithereens out of Afghanistan, he simply moved on to the next logical target – a genocidal madman who had violated no less than seventeen (!) U.N. resolutions aimed at getting him to disarm. We went in to Iraq, and of course, the war continues. To his credit, Bush warned us that both wars would not be easy or quick.

What sickened me the most during the years 2003-2005 or so, was the ceaseless, mindless, brain-dead anti-war protests in streets around the world, spurred-on by (as you said) Democrats in the US Congress who had been the exact same ones calling for Saddam’s removal during the 90s, all the way up to 2003.

In my opinion, all that should have stopped the moment that the first M1-Abrams rolled across the border into Iraq. Instead, millions of people (most of whom didn’t even have their facts straight) were out on the Capitol Mall day after day after freakin day, camped out near Bush’s ranch in Crawford, marching in Berzerk-ley here in California, doing everything they could to undermine the morale of our troops, call their own Commander in Chief all manner of filthy names, and in short, do everything they could do encourage a bunch of 7th-century, bloodthirsty barbarians to keep on fighting our men and butchering innocent civilians in Iraq and elsewhere.

The country was (and is) suffering from a deep political split. I agree, Rove is being too hard on himself. I put the blame for this mess squarely on the Left and its leaders. There was plenty of room for criticizing the Iraq War, but I never heard anything from its critics except “Bring them home now!” and to hell with the billions of dollars and thousands of lives spent getting us as far as we’d come. And to hell with what would become of Iraq after a premature withdrawal.

It got to the point where I wanted protestors arrested on sight and charged with…anything the police could think of.
- cylarz | 07/16/2010 @ 21:31
Most of the larger protests were also spurred, organized, and funded by various Marxist organizations from inside and outside the country, as Michele Malkin et al documented.

I understood why, and Rove just confirmed it, why the administration didn’t focus on the myriad of ankle-biting protests at home. It is in a way beneath the office to challenge every inane charge that comes up. But due to the fury whipped up over the 2000 election and the flame fanning by the world’s political left, it was a very large fire burning in the fuel of half-truths and outright falsehoods and it needed to be dealt with. I was screaming into the wind back then at the Administration to counter the charges publicly. Rove would, occasionally — but the man is pretty measured. Rumsfeld was pretty good at it but he was kept on a pretty short leash, I think, where that was concerned. Cheney has been excellent at it …. but started far too late.

It’s good to see the motives were honorable, but we’re now sitting in the middle of the wreckage caused by insufficient action.

And I’ve said before, to put a bright spin on it, it IS possible that we needed an Obama administration to wake us completely the hell up. Rude awakening with ice water, for some.

The Tea Party movement is evidence of that.

Let’s just hope it’s not too late.
- philmon | 07/17/2010 @ 08:03

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Rove: My Biggest Mistake at the White House
Thursday, July 15th, 2010