The Dangerous Games of Bush and Company

I sometimes suspect that President Bush is quietly trying to back away from and clean up the worst of his crimes in an effort to stay out of jail when he leaves office and the records of his tenure are exposed for the next president to see. Who knows? But the signs continue to grow that Bush will go down as the worst president in American history. And the most dishonest.

We already know that Bush and his White House colleagues lied their way into a war with Iraq. There were no weapons of mass destruction despite the claims of Bush and a host of neoconservatives. Other claims about Iraq were also proven false. For two years now, Bush and company, with the paranoid Dick Cheney being the loudest voice, have been making claims about Iran that also turn out—surprise!—to be false. Iran apparently discontinued its barely begun nuclear weapons program back in 2003. Oops.

Now some of the same neoconservative clowns who were screaming for war in Iraq in 2002 and couldn't understand why so many analysts in the CIA and State Department were so reluctant to see weapons of mass destruction that we now know did not exist are now claiming the CIA is again botching the intelligence. If neoconservatives don't hear what they want to hear, they are nevertheless adept at blaming the messenger. Think Progress has the story:

Norman Podhoretz, widely reputed to be the “godfather” of neoconservatism, has been one of the most aggressive hawks clamoring for war with Iran. Podhoretz laid out the “The Case For Bombing Iran” in a June cover story in the right-wing Commentary Magazine. He insisted that the Iranians were very close to developing a nuclear weapon...

(snip)

Yesterday’s NIE proved Podhoretz’s claims were false. Rather than modify his views on Iran, Podhoretz — who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004 — aired a nasty conspiracy theory yesterday, attacking the authors of the NIE and accusing the intelligence community of deliberately “leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush:”

Podhoretz is one of those fellows who insisted Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that the situation required an American invasion. He has no evidence to back up his current claims about Iran but obviously the CIA is lying. It's a strange world many of these right-wingers live in.

As for Bush and Cheney, how long have they known their claims about Iran have been, to put it politely, somewhat off the mark? Obviously Bush is being less than truthful when he says he didn't know. The president of the United States doesn't know what his own intelligence agencies are saying? Now that's embarrassing, criminal or just plain weird.

Lying, however, is not unknown to Bush and his advisers. Even out of office, Karl Rove still runs interference for his boss. Think Progress has that story too:

With an appearance on Fox News Sunday this weekend and an op-ed in the Financial Times on Sunday, former Bush political adviser (and new Newsweek contributor) Karl Rove has been busy injecting himself into the public discourse this week. Rove drew “a range of protesters” to a speech at Duke University last night, where he claimed “the United States has nothing to apologize in its conduct in the world."

These are the words of a man who led the White House Iraq Group whose purpose it was to sell a war the United States did not need based on justifications that were false. If nothing else, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush owe an apology to the American people.

Rove only last week claimed that the Bush Administration did not pressure Congress to back him up on Iraq just prior to the 2002 election. A number of Democrats who were in on the discussions and even some Republicans dismiss Rove's fabrication. Rove, of course, is a serial liar and a calculating one at that. He believes that if you lie often enough and loud enough, a fair number of foolish people may believe you. He also noticed a long time ago that the Washington press corps loves controversial lies, even if it is too lazy in this era to correct those lies. Rove's methods certainly worked in the beginning. But most of America has caught on to Karl Rove and the many other lies emanating from the Bush White House.

The election is a year away and it's not certain how the American people will vote. There is a new set of Republican presidential candidates who are just as right-wing as Bush, but several have an advantage over the current president: as wrong as they are for America, three or four of them are a bit more competent than Bush and would quite ably continue the damage that has been done to our nation in the last seven years.


**Personal Note. I haven't posted much lately because of a large and very interesting editing project I've been working on. I will try to do better.