Did Trump Walk Back on "Bush Lied"?

I agree that Bush was looking for an excuse to go after Saddam because Iraq was the world's leading sponsor of terrorism at the time. The neo-cons thought this was a good idea for the larger war on terrorism (as did the rest of the so-called coalition of the willing).

But your phrase lied in terms of misrepresentation is flagrantly inappropriate. Everyone in the world intelligence community actually believed that Saddam had WMDs. And as I pointed out, we have pretty good evidence from the Senate testimony of the second-highest general in the Iraqi Air Force that Saddam did have WMDs but that he got the WMDs out of Iraq just before we invaded (fully preparing to get hit by chemical or biological weapons, by the way).

So, you really ought to leave off the completely unsupported accusation--one of the lying Dems' favorite talking points!-- against President Bush.

By the same token, Trump owes President Bush an apology. It will not be forthcoming from that Alinskyite, of course.

Again, you fail to distinguish between usable WMD’s being in Iraq once upon a time which no one really disputes, and the known status of WMD’s in Iraq at the time Bush announced the invasion - BIG dispute about that.

Bush’s own Treasury Secretary has said that one of Bush’s first orders of business in 2001 as the new President was to invade Iraq and get Saddam. According to this staffer, Bush told his staff to find a rationale to invade.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/01/10/oneill.bush/

Doesn’t look like good faith to me. When GW did it, I thought he wanted to kill Saddam his own reasons. I felt like Iraq was GW’s personal war. Later I found out Saddam tried to take out his dad a few years before in Kuwait. So maybe that. I don’t give a sh*t what the Left thinks. If GW handed the Left something on a silver platter to attack him with, that’s GW’s fault.

Again, you fail to distinguish between usable WMDâ€™s being in Iraq once upon a time which no one really disputes, and the known status of WMDâ€™s in Iraq at the time Bush announced the invasion - BIG dispute about that.

"Again"? No. That's an inoperative word in this context--certainly not a sure sign that you are a patient, reasonable guy (grin!). You have gone on to declare that I am "fail[ing] to distinguish" between having indisputably correct intelligence and having false or perhaps imperfect intelligence.

No, that is an inoperative accusation against me. Gosh, Jim, you are the one who is not facing the reality to which you are alluding. The problem is that you are again (or perhaps still?) refusing to repent of your worse-case "spin," by which spin you have quickly and simplistically leaped (with Trump's politically bloodthirsty encouragement at this time, perhaps?) to the vicious, flatfooted accusation that Bush was lying.

That is an extraordinarily serious accusation that you cannot even begin to support. In short, you are not on ethical ground, friend FReeper. You are angry but not properly thoughtful. You have become ethically unhinged by your anger at the political status quo.

Are you a Trumpster? You sound like you are. Your insinuation that Bush knew that Saddam did not have WMDs in Iraq at the time is not supported by any credible source whatsoever. It is a leftist innuendo against Bush--nothing more, nothing less.

Again, as I was careful to point out in my post, a very high-ranking Iraqi general testified that he believed that Saddam did have WMDs in Iraq merely days before our invasion. The shipments were so secret that even he was not permitted to know what was in the dozens of planeloads of materials that went to Damascus just before the invasion.

Did you even know about that post-war testimony when you "concluded" that Bush had been lying all along? And did you know that our troops did find 1.4 million pounds of yellow cake uranium (that Saddam wasn't supposed to have!) when we invaded Iraq? I'll bet you didn't know that, either.

Why do I suspect that you didn't know these things? It's because you are not clearly very well-connected with the truth. You were even ignorant of the fact that Saddam had tried to assassinate Bush 41--until someone revealed that historical fact much later in your manifestly naive experience of important history.

Learning this only late, as you did, it seemed (to you) to be confirmation of your suspicion that the whole Iraqi mess was GWBs "personal war." Unfortunately, it didn't fully dawn on you that the assassination attempt was actually just another piece of evidence that Saddam needed killin', as we would say in Texas. Any good POTUS would say the same thing, not just the POTUS son of a former POTUS who had been targeted.

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Jim, I am afraid that Trump has struck a responsive note with people who have little more moral integrity than he has--which, in his bizarre case, is practical none at all. Trump's exaggerations, which unfortunately quickly morph into false accusations against anyone who stands in his political way. Trump's vicious ad hominem attacks against Carson even got him a serious reprimand from Michael Savage--who is, let's say, not exactly the world's nicest, most thoughtful guy (even if he is sometimes right on specific matters in the Body Politic).

I believe Rush was correct when he opined that Trump deliberately/knowingly used a false accusation against President Bush to try to win crossover votes from Dems in SC open primary--which was likely his only hope of winning the primary in evangelical territory. You might think this was a shrewed, noble strategy for building his momentum, but I think Trump is the biggest liar by far (Rubio is clearly #2) left in the race.

Yellow cake uranium in raw form is not usable ready-to-launch WMD’s. That’s the point.

I have had my views on Bush and his predetermined and totally misguided decision to invade Iraq since he decided to do it. My views on this have nothing to do with Trump, the Left, or the Man in the Moon.

You still haven't addressed the evidence that Bush WASN'T lying. You have just reasserted your long-standing views by reasserting like "I thought, I believed, I felt." This underscores the fact that you never had any real evidence for your suspicions.

(Heck, Bush had more evidence for WMDs than you have had to the effect that Bush was surely lying through the whole run-up to the war. The fact that you didn't agree with the war is beside the point.)

Anyway, I am glad you are not goofy enough to be a Trumpster. And I am delighted to have had this overall discussion to keep this important thread alive.

I intend to go record--as often as possible--with the fact of my dismay at so many FReepers who think Trump is a great candidate. He is not an honest man. Oddly enough, Bush was a surprisingly honest POTUS who is now being trashed by a dishonest man.

Yes, there’s plenty of evidence some of which I’ve given you some of which you’ll find on other posts and for yourself.

And BTW, I am a Trumper (vs. Trumpette). But unlike many around here, I don’t blindly follow the political candidate who I support. To me, that is suicide. A candidate for President is asking you to PAY him to take tremendous power over you. You better go in with your eyes wide open because electing a politician is like a treaty with a foreign government - they can turn on you at any time. After vetting them, you trust BUT you VERIFY. And if they violate your trust, you call off the treaty and you THROW THE BUM OUT at the next election if not before.

Newt has you NeverTrumpers pegged, “whiny, sniveling negative cowards”