Posted on 11/21/2010 7:29:49 AM PST by Scanian
Syndicated columnist and PBS regular Mark Shields on Friday actually said on national television that he has never heard a Democratic leader or presidential candidate accuse former President George W. Bush of lying America into the Iraq War.
This was said in response to Charles Krauthammer telling his fellow "Inside Washington" panelists that this all too common media assertion is the "essential untruth of this decade" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
GORDON PETERSON, HOST: What’s happened to honest objective reporting?
EVAN THOMAS, NEWSWEEK: Well, I’m not sure there ever was honest objective reporting, but there is an interesting thing going on. You would think with the internet and cable and all these new outlets, more information should mean more truth. The more information, the freer, the more open it is should mean more truth. But I worry that the opposite has happened. That, there, it’s now more possible for untruth to adhere, to take hold. In the example that people were talking about this week was this thing that got out from first the Indian press, then to Drudge, then to the right wing radio guys and then Congress that Obama was spending $200 million a day on his foreign trip which was just nonsense. It was finally knocked down. But, you start to wonder, you hear, people get their information by the internet, by e-mails from their Uncle Joe. You know, if that’s where they are getting their information, is it possible that real untruth will take hold in a way that we didn’t think was possible in our system?
NINA TOTENBERG, NPR: I think that this a, this is worrisome, and it’s left and right. It’s the people who think the Bush administration somehow was responsible for 9/11, or that a trip that clearly costs in total something like five or six million at the most, and it’s really 200 million. It’s not the same, I mean a day. They’re, they’re not the same in importance obviously, but, but, this really, the fact that there is no -- there doesn’t seem to be any factual agreement about anything allows us to sort of entertain the most odd and conspiratorial fantasies.
Syria...who knows?
Yes...I think Bush had a personal honor vendetta on Saddam...can't say I blame him.
But did he and Blair and others concoct his whole war for political gain...no...not to me anyhow.
But as is human nature they may have followed intel where they wanted it lead rather than where they did not.
I sure don't see it as a big conspiracy.
For me the real defeat of the War of Terror is our inability to define the enemy for whom it is....Islam and failure to be realistic about the followers and instead to just ignore realities that defy the new PC logic concerning anyone not considered white....were most Islamists Afrikaaners we would give no such political quarter.
That is the big failure and in time we will rue our weakness.
TSA patdowns, civilian trials, calling Islam a religion of peace when it is anything but and calling terrorism man-made disasters and refusing to call it Islamic terrorism are all signs we are weak as runny butter.
Thanks for that list. We need to complete it with comments from other countries leaders who basically made the same claims.
Hell, it’s been many times on this thread.
I don’t waste words on people with a closed mind.
Read post # 13 again, read the whole thing slowly and let it sink in, maybe then you’ll get a clue!
No problem. Most of us have never heard of Mark Shields.
Actually, that was British intelligence.
Anyway, why don't you take a hike you freaking moron.
To denigrate his motives in retrospect is what the Commie crats do. So you have fine company, nit.
No, I don’t think it was for political gain or some kind of conspiracy. I just think it was something Bush wanted to do. I think he had his own reasons.
Yes there was a general consensus that Hussein had WMD, but as I said (post#38), by the time Bush was ready to order the invasion, the WMD thing was an issue seriously questioned by intelligence he was getting. Bush could have waited to verify but didn't. He chose to order invasion of Iraq anyway because he just plain wanted to do it for his own reasons IMHO. I think evidence this was the subsequent invention of the so-called “Bush Doctrine.”
The truth is that the president misled America when he sent us to war. -- Howard Dean
"I think the president owes this country an explanation because what the president said was not entirely truthful, and he needs to explain why that was. -- Howard Dean
150,000 American troops are bogged down in a quagmire in Iraq because the Bush administration misrepresented and distorted the intelligence to justify a war that America never should have fought. -- Ted Kennedy
Now, he misled the American people in his speech when he said we will plan carefully. They obviously didn't. He misled the American people when he said we'd go to war as a last resort. We did not go as a last resort. And most Americans know the difference. -- John Kerry
He misled every one of us. That's one reason why I'm running to be president of the United States. -- John Kerry
I think Teddy Kennedy started the “Bush lied us into war” theme a few months after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and then many other Democrats joined in.
oooooo. You got me. You can tell I’m a lib by looking at my posting history here on FR.
I don’t recall him repeating the “Bush lied” meme but Obama himself rose to prominence on an anti-war theme, i.e., the war was unjust, we had no business being there, Afghanistan is/was the “good” war, etc.
That's revisionism, plain and simple. There was conflicting intelligence, some questioning whether there really was concrete evidence. However, this was countered by other intelligence and by Hussein himself, who on numerous occasions refused to say that he DID NOT have WMD., even after 17 UN resolutions. At the time of the invasion France and others thought Iraq had chemical and nuclear weapons programs . Hussein had plenty of chances to stave off invasion, even after dozens of provocative incursions into no fly zones, and so on.
So how does this compare to the phony Gulf of Tonklin resolution? The leftist revisionists have used this phony re-reading of the events leading to Iraq to help elect a neo -Communist to the Presidency.. And then we have you, stating that Bush "lied'. You are a nitwit, nitwit.
Anyway, it's delightful but fairly rare when one can get into an interesting and stimulating debate without feeling like he's being attacked by a legion of elementary-school kids on a playground.
Hey, at least I agree with you that Bush was a conundrum.
‘Anyway, it’s delightful but fairly rare when one can get into an interesting and stimulating debate without feeling like he’s being attacked by a legion of elementary-school kids on a playground.’
Your original implication that President Bush lied us into the Iraq war amounts to a charge that he deliberately murdered thousands of allied troops and hundreds of thousands of other humans. It is a charge of Treason, justifying the death penalty. You make this attack on a man who, for all of his faults, is clearly an honorable patriot. Then you are annoyed that people react emotionally to your vile calumny.
There was more then one “Bush Doctrine. As for your assertion some of his own people question the existence of WMD what is your point? Intelligence is never a slam dunk positive or negative anyway. It is a gathering of bits of info which are then assembled and looked at in their entirety to see if a pattern of probability exists for what they are looking for.
In this case ALL the Intel agencies agreed with the assessment Hussein had and was manufacturing these WMD. Sure there were doubters, there are ALWAYS those who will see it differently, but here you are claiming because no WMD were found, then Bush lied or at least was negligent in following the advice of the great minority who said they weren’t there. It is easy to look with the crystal clarity of 20/20 hindsight and point the finger of blame.
Leaders, whether they be CEO’s or presidents make decisions based on ALL the evidence before them and take a course which is best suited to the attainment of the mission. In the case of the president of the USA, his first and foremost mission is the safety, long and short term of the citizens of the country he was elected to oversee.
If he erred then he did so on the side of caution and were I he I would have done the same thing. I would do it again if a similar preponderance of evidence were presented regarding another country intent on doing us harm.
Please remember that except for the likes of Bernie Sanders and his ilk, ALL the leading Democrats were on board since 1998 regarding the removal of Hussein and fully supported the Bush decision to take him out. It was only afetr the liberal base began to whine that the libs in Congress began to wimp, out.
It doesn’t amount to that at all. It means he had reasons for going into Iraq (probably felt justified because Sadaam was reportedly responsible for the deaths of up to 300,000 Iraqis).
His reaction to 9/11 basically surprised the Islamofascists. He put the face of single-minded determination against our attackers and those that harbored them and sent them running back into their caves. They were expecting more Clinton-Lib wishy-washy double-mindedness but Bush stood up for America here. God bless him for that. And God bless him for bringing a sense of personal morality and dignity back into the White House.
The rest, however, is another story.
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