Bush Lied, People Died

It fits on a bumper sticker, and is easy to chant – a Liberal dream.

It’s also not true, but truth has never been a Liberal necessity.

The “lie” appears to be that President Bush said Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction. That, of course, was true. It is almost indisputable (I write almost, because there are some fanatics that are armed with their own “facts,” such as that 9/11 was an inside job), that Saddam had WMD and used it in the Iraq-Iran War, and on the Kurds before Gulf War I. Critics of President Bush say that he was determined to attack Iraq, although they often don’t mention that for over a year President Bush through the United Nations tried to make Saddam comply with UN resolutions.

Further, these same critics don’t bother to explain that President Bush’s Democratic predecessors were all on record stating that Saddam had WMD, and so were the governments and intelligence organizations of the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Italy, etc. In fact, there was no credible opposition or proof before the invasion of Iraq from any nation stating that Saddam did not have WMD.

Democratic leaders – President Clinton, VP Al Gore, Senator Kerry, Senator Feinstein – were also on record stating that Saddam was a threat to world peace. (As presented on TruthorFiction.com) It was only after the invasion of Iraq that Democrats began their revision of history, and found that, even though they all had privy to the same raw intelligence that President Bush saw, he somehow had been able to mislead them.

This ability to mislead is very interesting, since apparently they feel he was able to do it to them even before he became president, since they now give him sole credit for branding Saddam as a threat. Therefore, President Bush must have been spinning his lies about Saddam at least as early as 1998, over two years before he became president.

In the beginning, Liberals needed to brand President Bush a liar, because Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, and later John Kerry were repeatedly exposed as liars. The best way to fight is to use an opponent’s strength against him, to “fight fire with fire.” In this case, Republicans having a field day calling Democrats liars had to be quieted.

Bill Clinton was full of lies, and it took a scribe with a water-cooled word processor to keep up. Clinton earned his reputation long before Monica “I did not have sex with that woman” Lewinsky. The most trivial things were invitations to deception. When black churches were being burned in the South, Clinton famously said: "I have vivid and painful memories of black churches being burned in my own state when I was a child." However, even blacks and Arkansas Democrats were incensed by this lie, and Clinton’s “vivid” memories soon morphed into more vague recollections.

At Rosa Parks’ funeral, Clinton produced another vivid memory: "I remember as if it were yesterday, that fateful day 50 years ago. I was a 9-year-old southern white boy who rode on a segregated bus every single day of my life." He goes on to say that it was after Parks refused to give up her seat that he and two friends decided they wouldn't sit in the front anymore.

Great story! Clinton describes how Rosa Parks’ courage moved him to take a principled stand. He let some of her glory rub off on him.

Except it wasn’t true. Neither of his boyhood home towns, Hope or Hot Springs, had public transportation at the time. Since the schools were segregated, if it was a school bus he was thinking about, there weren’t any blacks on it either.

Clinton became the “first black president,” but was a Democrat when Democratic governors and politicians in the South were all segregationists, and Republicans like President Eisenhower were the champions of civil rights for blacks. I wonder what vivid memories he has of his racist mentor, Senator William Fulbright, condemning integration, and of another Arkansas Democrat, Governor Orval Faubus, calling out the Arkansas National Guard to block integration in Little Rock?

Not to be outdone, Hillary demonstrated that the “smartest woman in America” had one of the most selective memories in America, and probably set records by stating “I don’t remember” or similar words over 250 times in answer to judicial and congressional investigators’ questions.

In Blizzard of Lies, William Safire notes: “Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady -- a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation -- is a congenital liar.”

Maybe he was thinking how, upon meeting Sir Edmund Hillary, she told him how her mother named her “Hillary” in his honor, ever though Sir Edmund didn’t become famous until five years after her birth.

In a report released October 18, 2000, independent counsel Robert Ray determined Hillary had given false testimony when questioned about White House travel office firings, a crime that Ray declined to prosecute. Ditto for her recollections of how she made a 10,000 percent profit in a year on cattle futures by studying the Wall Street Journal.

Did Al Gore lie? Is the Pope a Catholic?

Al told a Teamster’s meeting that one of the lullabies he remembered from his youth was “look for the union label,” which came out in 1975, when he was 27.

Then he told Florida senior citizens that his mother-in-law paid $108 a month for the same arthritis medicine he gave his dog for $37.80 a month. A great story, except the figures he used were taken from a House Democratic study and did not reflect his family's own costs. Moreover, the study's figures referred to wholesale prices, not prices paid by the consumer.

But why let the truth get in the way of making political points?

And then along came John Kerry. Who but Democratic faithful can forget the following, try as they might?

On the floor of the Senate on March 27, 1986, Sen. John Kerry issued this statement: "I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the President of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared — seared — in me."

Seared memories, vivid memories, memories just like yesterday – somehow such clear memories don’t stand up when tested against facts.

For instance, John Kerry attributed the statement that “the troops were not in Cambodia” to President Nixon, who wouldn’t take office for another month. But Nixon’s presidency fit Kerry’s 1968 memory much better than the Khmer Rouge did, which wasn’t active before 1970. Both Kerry and Douglas Brinkley, an author who wrote of Kerry’s exploits in Viet Nam, also provided other versions of the “Christmas in Cambodia” story, as the need for new explanations arose over the years since.

Their versions fit in with the time-honored Democratic tradition of using false stories to illustrate greater truths. “Everyone knows that Richard Nixon would have lied to the American people about not having troops in Cambodia if he did have them there. The fact he didn’t at the time – maybe because he wasn’t president yet – doesn’t change the fact that he would have lied about it if given the chance.”

(The above is a made-up quote that illustrates a greater truth that Democrats would like you to know about Richard Nixon.)

In summary, it also illustrates why the Democrat’s mantra is “Bush lied.” They think that focusing on “lying” will make the Republicans avoid the subject of Democratic liars.

Sorry, “Democratic liars” is a too “target rich” environment.