Tuesday, November 15, 2005
"They Lie About Everything": Not Just The Truth, But A Rallying Cry
Reed Hundt talks about why BushCo so desperately is trying to rewrite recent history. But what he doesn't understand is that most Americans aren't going to read the reports he references. E.J. Dionne takes a more effective tack, which is to remind us of what actually happened in the fall of 2002:
The big difference between our current president and his father is that the first President Bush put off the debate over the Persian Gulf War until after the 1990 midterm elections. The result was one of most substantive and honest foreign policy debates Congress has ever seen, and a unified nation. The first President Bush was scrupulous about keeping petty partisanship out of the discussion. The current President Bush did the opposite. He pressured Congress for a vote before the 2002 election, and the war resolution passed in October. Sen. Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat who is no dove, warned of rushing "pell-mell" into an endorsement of broad war powers for the president. The Los Angeles Times reported that Sen. Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, protested in September: "We're being asked to go to war, and vote on it in a matter of days. We need an intelligence estimate before we can seriously vote." And Rep. Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, put it plainly: "This will be one of the most important decisions Congress makes in a number of years; I do not believe it should be made in the frenzy of an election year." But it was. Grand talk about liberating Iraq gave way to cheap partisan attacks. In New Mexico, Republican Steve Pearce ran an advertisement against Democrat John Arthur Smith declaring: "While Smith 'reflects' on the situation, the possibility of a mushroom cloud hovering over a U.S. city still remains." Note that Smith wasn't being attacked for opposing the war, only for reflecting on it. God forbid that any Democrat dare even think before going to war. Marc Racicot, then chairman of the Republican National Committee, said about the late Sen. Paul Wellstone's opposition to the war resolution: "He has set about to diminish the capacity of this nation to defend itself. That is a legitimate issue." Wellstone, who died in a plane crash a few days before the election, was not intimidated. But other Democrats were.I've said this before, but it bears repeating. If you want to keep it simple, as a message to pass on to your friends, simply say this: Bush and the Republicans lie about everything. EVERYTHING. This is the rallying cry for 2006 and 2008. They lied about Social Security. They lied about their response (or complete lack thereof) to Katrina. They lied about their meddling in the Terri Schiavo case. They lied about why they wanted to invade Iraq. Clinton only lied about his relationship with a woman in her mid-twenties who wasn't his wife, and for the most part we were glad he lied because we didn't want to know about it in the first place and it didn't affect us. Bush and his minions lie about things that directly affect us and billions of other people. They lie like we breathe. And their lies are killing us. It's as simple as that.
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