The Downing Street Memo and Bush Prevarication Timeline
I was wondering when the right was going to give up and quit pretending to believe that Bush didn't lie about the WMD evidence in the lead-up to the Iraq war. Then came the Deep Throat revelations and I was surprised to realize that there are still crypto-Nixonites out there...
One trick to being a good partisan or a good lying politician is to never, ever, ever admit that you lied, no matter how clear the evidence becomes. Karl Rove has this strategy down cold, as do the Reagan partisans who still deny even the wrongness of Iran-Contra. (Johnson basically admitted that he lied about the Gulf of Tonkin, but people don't seem to give enough of a damn about that nevertheless.)
At any rate, here for you amusement/angrification is a prevarication timeline from Think Progress (via Atrios). The addition of the Downing Street Memo to our evidential base will, of course, be irrelevant to those who have decided to ignore the evidence, but as for the rest of us, it's comforting to know that we weren't crazy during the Great Kabuki Show of 2003. I, for one, kept looking around frantically during the build-up to the war thinking "Am I nuts? Isn't this an obvious put-up job? But lots of people seem to be acting like this all makes sense... Christ, I must be losing it..."
No, we weren't losing it. All those red staters who took the blue pill and allowed life to go on as before, blissfully averting their gaze from the heinous logical and moral sins that stared them in the face, living in the fantasy world in which the president was honest and virtuous...well, I suppose there's little to be done for them.
As for us, what can we do? I'd suggest, first, that we renew our own resolve to never allow ourselves to be herded along like credulous sheep to accept such a mistaken, pre-ordained conclusion. Some day a liberal president will try to do the same thing. Let's hope we acquit ourselves better than did our conservative friends. Second, we can't let people forget what really happened. As with the bogus deification of Ronald Reagan, we've got to fight the inevitable attempts to spin tales about Bush's honesty and virtue, and fight the attempts by the conservative Ministry of Truth to re-write the history of the war.
That is, we have to tell the truth. And re-tell it, and re-tell it and re-tell it. Tell it as many times as they tell the lies. The evidence is on our side in these matters, but we have to speak it, or it will sit there mutely, overwhelmed by finely-honed, oft-repeated lies.
Remember Orwell:
"That the truth is great and will prevail is a prayer rather than an axiom."
I was wondering when the right was going to give up and quit pretending to believe that Bush didn't lie about the WMD evidence in the lead-up to the Iraq war. Then came the Deep Throat revelations and I was surprised to realize that there are still crypto-Nixonites out there...
One trick to being a good partisan or a good lying politician is to never, ever, ever admit that you lied, no matter how clear the evidence becomes. Karl Rove has this strategy down cold, as do the Reagan partisans who still deny even the wrongness of Iran-Contra. (Johnson basically admitted that he lied about the Gulf of Tonkin, but people don't seem to give enough of a damn about that nevertheless.)
At any rate, here for you amusement/angrification is a prevarication timeline from Think Progress (via Atrios). The addition of the Downing Street Memo to our evidential base will, of course, be irrelevant to those who have decided to ignore the evidence, but as for the rest of us, it's comforting to know that we weren't crazy during the Great Kabuki Show of 2003. I, for one, kept looking around frantically during the build-up to the war thinking "Am I nuts? Isn't this an obvious put-up job? But lots of people seem to be acting like this all makes sense... Christ, I must be losing it..."
No, we weren't losing it. All those red staters who took the blue pill and allowed life to go on as before, blissfully averting their gaze from the heinous logical and moral sins that stared them in the face, living in the fantasy world in which the president was honest and virtuous...well, I suppose there's little to be done for them.
As for us, what can we do? I'd suggest, first, that we renew our own resolve to never allow ourselves to be herded along like credulous sheep to accept such a mistaken, pre-ordained conclusion. Some day a liberal president will try to do the same thing. Let's hope we acquit ourselves better than did our conservative friends. Second, we can't let people forget what really happened. As with the bogus deification of Ronald Reagan, we've got to fight the inevitable attempts to spin tales about Bush's honesty and virtue, and fight the attempts by the conservative Ministry of Truth to re-write the history of the war.
That is, we have to tell the truth. And re-tell it, and re-tell it and re-tell it. Tell it as many times as they tell the lies. The evidence is on our side in these matters, but we have to speak it, or it will sit there mutely, overwhelmed by finely-honed, oft-repeated lies.
Remember Orwell:
"That the truth is great and will prevail is a prayer rather than an axiom."
posted by Winston Smith at
4:00 PM
3 Comments:
None the less, Michael Moore is still fat and Howard Dean is just so darn rude.
Let's keep perspective here.
RAPE ROOMS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Make no mistake, Bush came into office determined to solve Saddam, because Clinton refused to. Clinton permitted the expulsion of the inspectors in the first place, and afterward launched a few token cruise missles at Saddam for violating his peace treaty, if you'll recall.
But not necessarily solving him with war, as Bush said so yesterday. That is the truth behind the Downing St. Memo.
I do believe, and am willing to argue (aren't I always?) that had France been a faithful ally to the US and UK, instead of trotting about the globe rounding up support to oppose any action (presumably to preserve her sweet, corrupt Oil-for-Peace deal with Saddam), he would have abdicated and would be knocking back marguaritas on the Riviera as we speak, to the great relief and delight of humankind, not to mention his lovely sons Uday and Attila.
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