Amazing Dishonesty

Karl Rove was a recent guest on Charlie Rose’s show and was interviewed. He is writing a book (DUH!), and has a big surprise in it. He informs Mr. Rose that the Bush Administration was upset with Congress in the autumn of 2002 because Congress was pushing forward to have debates about invading Iraq. The Bush Administration, according to Karl Rove felt that congress was pushing them to war. If one reads news releases from October of 2002 from www.whitehouse.gov, one would find out that Karl Rove is exhibiting great dishonesty.

Here’s the thing. The Bush Administration is the administration that brought us to war in Iraq. This is not an opinion. It’s pretty much a simple fact. The Bush administration, according to the news articles on the White House website was happy to have Congress have the debates and issue authorization.

Talk about chutzpah! Talk about an amazing sense of dishonesty. Sadly, the Karl Rove’s of the world are mightily abundant, those people who willingly commit character assassination and teach others to do it. Politicians are no longer taught statesmanship, they are taught character assassination and we are the worse for it.

But then President Bill Clinton addressed the war. In 2002 he supported the war in a very vocal fashion. He made speeches to the effect that Saddam Hussein was a threat and that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. I was opposed to the war from the start as it violated the ethical Just War Principles, but I did give Bill Clinton a listen. He surprised me at the time.

But now, in his speeches, low and behold, Bill Clinton is now saying that he was against the war from the start and never for it. I’m guessing that you have to determine what the word ‘for’ is.

Karl Rove and Bill Clinton are never people who worried about telling the truth. But this is crazy as the records of their lies are very much out there.

Lots of people in Congress and the media made determinations about the war based on the intelligence that the Bush Administration gave them. We now know that the reports were cooked and tilted to back what the Administration wanted. Hans Blick, the weapons inspector was vilified by Rove, and his intelligence reports that there were no weapons of mass destruction were ignored. They were right, but they were ignored.

I give most of the people in Congress a pass on this. They based their decisions on bad information. They should have pursued more information, but they didn’t. For that, they should be criticized. They didn’t, however, have a reason to not believe what they were given.

Karl Rove knew better and Bill Clinton had to know better. He was the President for 8 years and certainly had been briefed by the CIA very extensively. He might have been in his lazy boy eating a Big Mac when the war debate took place, but his knowledge of the region was greater than average.

As an aside, Hillary’s statements on the war, now, have to be also suspect.

This is all such amazing dishonesty.

Over 3800 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq. At the very least people ought to be honest about the events and thoughts leading up to the war.