Bush Lied, People Died

I guess that it's become kind of passé now to beat up on Baby Doc Bush any more, and the minions of the BFEE have started making appearances on news shows (and on Faux News as well) in an attempt to rehabilitate him.

No, not that kind of rehab, although he for sure needs it. He's always been a "dry drunk" who never resolved his own alcohol issues (or his parent issues or his personality issues, etc etc)

No, it's his reputation and his "place in history" that is sorely in need of rehabilitation, and people like Dick(less) Cheney and his lame-assed sock-puppet daughter and criminal mastermind Karl "I'm a criminal but I'm not in jail" Rove who are active in the field of perception rehab on behalf of the little fucker and his whole maladminstration.

So it was with great interest that I read David Corn's latest screed on Baby Doc, Can the 'Bush Lied' Deniers Handle the Truth? over at Politics Daily:

Conservative apologists for the George W. Bush crew are swinging hard these days to defend their man -- and themselves -- from the charge that W. and his gang misled the nation into war. They must worry that they are going to end up on the wrong side of history. After all, a 2008 Gallup poll found that 53 percent of Americans believed that the Bush administration "deliberately misled the American public about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction."
...a classified October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, a summation of the intelligence community's assessments...stated:
We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction program, in defiance of U.N. resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons, as well as missiles with ranges in excess of U.N. restrictions. If left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.
This NIE was, of course, wrong. Iraq had no active WMD programs, no stockpiles. But Wehner and others point to it as a holy writ that justifies everything Bush, Dick Cheney and other administration officials said. Which is odd, because the Bush White House admitted after the war began that Bush had not bothered to read the entire 93-page document. Had he done so, he would have seen that the report contained important caveats regarding key aspects of the case -- particularly Bush's claim that Saddam Hussein was actively pursing nuclear weapons and close to possessing them.
But Bush needed to read the intelligence only if he cared about presenting a bound-by-the-facts argument. Instead, he and his aides consistently overstated the iffy intelligence (which itself overstated Saddam's WMD capacities) and they made stuff up. Really. They repeatedly issued provocative assertions that were not backed up by even the flawed intelligence.

This is of course nothing new to those of us out here in Farleftistan, but it still rankles and sticks in the craw of the hardcore Bushies. Witness some of the comments left by the wingnuts to this post:

·Well, if he lied, then he lied. I think most of us are so used to it by now that we figure all Politicians do. How far back do we have to go? As Far back as Washington? I doubt the present President is any more honest then Bush.
·Ahhh. The beautiful desparate squeal of the left as their annointed messiah and his minion rape the constitution and send the democrat party into exile for at least a decade. All the more enjoyable as they fight the "we can't win in Iraq" war as democracy takes hold.
Bush and our military won the war. Bush and our military won the peace. Genocide thwarted. Freedom bestowed. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
·Bush did not mislead this country any more than Pelosi, Kerry, Kennedy, Reid and all the other Liberal Democrats who voted to go to war in Iraq. All of the errors that Bush may have made in his 8 years in office can't compare to the damage Obama has done to our country in just over one year!

That last one is my personal favorite. Killing over 5000 soldiers was an "error" which has been eclipsed by the damage that Obama has done in just one year!

There's no hope for that part of the population that refuses to see reality and still sees Obama as that "uppity Negro in the White house".

But that aside, I have this inchoate fear that ultimately the people whitewashing Baby Doc will be successful and future textbooks will praise him.

After all, in Texas, history books will no longer even mention Thomas Jefferson.

Remember the quotation from Voltaire that graces the left column of this blog: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."