Wednesday, May 20, 2015

The Truth Is Out There


In fact, the truth has always been out there, in plain sight, racing neck-and-neck with the Party of Personal Responsibility's farrago of ridiculous lies.

From David Corn, yesterday:
Jeb Bush Says His Brother Was Misled Into War by Faulty Intelligence. That's Not What Happened.
He and other Republican presidential contenders have a new and bogus spin on how the Iraq War began.
What David has to say is all well and good, but there is nothing "new" about it.

From Joe Conason in  2006:
“Saddam chose to deny inspectors”

Bush repeated this bald-faced lie recently. The cowering press still lets him get away with it, but the public is no longer fooled.

Slowly but inexorably, as more and more information emerges, the conventional wisdom about the events leading to war in Iraq is shifting. The American public has joined the rest of the civilized world in questioning the arguments and motives of the war makers. Commentators who have habitually fashioned excuses for the White House seem to find that task increasingly burdensome and humiliating. The old lies no longer have much traction.

Yet even now, President Bush persists in blatantly falsifying the war’s origins — perhaps because, even now, he still gets away with it.

At his most recent press conference, that strange impulse to utter a ridiculous lie seemed to seize the president. It happened when he called on Hearst columnist Helen Thomas.

“I’d like to ask you, Mr. President, your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, wounds of Americans and Iraqis for a lifetime,” said the venerable correspondent in her confrontational style. “Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is, why did you really want to go to war?”

Bush responded by denying that he wanted war, a pro forma assertion that nobody believes. He blathered on for a while about Sept. 11, the Taliban, al-Qaida and protecting America from terrorism.

And when Thomas reminded him that she had asked about Iraq, he said, “I also saw a threat in Iraq. I was hoping to solve this problem diplomatically. That’s why I went to the [United Nations] Security Council; that’s why it was important to pass [Resolution] 1441, which was unanimously passed. And the world said, disarm, disclose, or face serious consequences — and therefore, we worked with the world, we worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny inspectors, when he chose not to disclose [emphasis added], then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did, and the world is safer for it.”

The official transcript notes “laughter” at that moment.

What was so funny? Were her colleagues laughing at Thomas, whose monopoly on testicular fortitude has shamed them all for so long? In the days that followed, the bully boys of the right-wing media enthusiastically abused Thomas, which was predictable enough. But have the rest of the reporters in the press room become so accustomed to presidential prevarication that they literally cannot hear a stunning falsehood that is repeated over and over again?

For the third time since the war began three years ago, Bush had falsely claimed that Saddam refused the U.N. weapons inspections mandated by the Security Council. For the third time, he had denied a reality witnessed by the entire world during the four months when those inspectors, under the direction of Hans Blix, traveled Iraq searching fruitlessly for weapons of mass destruction that, as we now know for certain, were not there.
...
Your Crazy Uncle Liberty continues to profess utter, indestructible faith in the childishly obvious poison extruded by the Right for the same reason the Heaven's Gate crew continued to believe a mothership was coming to take them away right up until they committed mass suicide.  Because they are broken, credulous creatures who have gone all-in with a cult from which there is no escape.

But from Fox News to The New York Times, those who run the Conservative propaganda meth labs and who sell poison to the Pig People for money know better.  And from PBS to MSNBC, those who enable the Conservative propaganda meth cooks and dealers by blunting any criticism of their toxic business model with an automatic and universal "But Both Sides..."know better.

They assist the destroyers because of the money and influence it brings, and because that money and influence insulates them from consequences of the disasters the destroyers create.  And until that money and influence is threatened -- until consorting with monsters starts coming with a terrible price tag -- the status quo will never change.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

That's what I call restraint. You didn't mention that prick Brooks even once. Nice.

Fran / Blue Gal said...

They are all beholden to Northrup Grummond, Boeing, and Raytheon. Right above God in the org chart.

You're such a good writer. Will you marry me?

896216598755556665 said...

Because I wanted to fuel my rage, I did a duckduckgo search on "Bush Iraq" and clicked on the links of major "objective" news sites. I'm looking here for acknowledgment that the intelligence on Iraq was cooked on purpose. The village consensus is that the intelligence was "flawed." Lets see how many villagers can figure out why.

CNN:

"One reason for that is the bipartisan consensus now forming that the war was a mistake given that Hussein's weapons of mass destruction -- used as a justification for war -- did not exist."

Sounds pretty good acknowledgment of the facts, but in the interest of comity, CNN can't bring itself to say that the intelligence was cooked maliciously, and that a big chunk of the GOP -- the ones who don't read Brooks -- still don't know the truth.

And let's count the paragraphs where this comes in: 16 paragraphs in. You know what comes way before that?

"Democrats make a case that the 2003 invasion invalidated an entire school of Republican political thought -- neoconservatism -- and say the war proves the GOP cannot be trusted with U.S. national security.

Republicans meanwhile insist the war was all but won in 2009 by Bush's belated troop surge and blame Obama for being more concerned with honoring a political promise to end the war than the reality of the deeply unstable nation he left behind."

Yeah, driftglass, you made me angry and depressed, so now I return the favor.

CSMonitor: Second paragraph: "“No,” they said to a man, “Knowing what we know now [about the faulty – some say concocted – intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and connections to al Qaeda], I would not have done what George W. Bush did.” "

Some say... in brackets. Still, pretty good. The CSMonitor isn't going to let something like lying us into war completely slide. Good outfit.

Time Magazine: Nothing.

Washington Post: Nothing.

Reuters: Worse than nothing: "George W. Bush made his decision to go to war and assembled an international coalition to help the United States carry it out based on intelligence indicating Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction.

The intelligence turned out to be wrong, and the decision to go to war remains a topic of hot debate in the United States as Iraq is in turmoil with the rise of Islamic State militants."

THe intelligence turned out to be wrong. WTF.

New York Times: Nothing.

NY Daily News: Obvious.

So out of seven papers, only ONE makes mention of the mendacity; and that paper is only read by news nerds.

Neo Tuxedo said...

They assist the destroyers because of the money and influence it brings, and because that money and influence insulates them from consequences of the disasters the destroyers create. And until that money and influence is threatened -- until consorting with monsters starts coming with a terrible price tag -- the status quo will never change.

The problem, it seems to me, is that no action taken by mere humans can threaten that money and influence any longer. Only a disaster from which that money and influence cannot protect them will threaten it. Only a complete collapse -- of the economy, of society, of the ecology -- will knock the props out from under them.

"'How did you go bankrupt?' Bill asked.
"'Two ways,' Mike said. 'Gradually and then suddenly.'"
-- Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

Ivory Bill Woodpecker said...

I fear NT is correct--and of course, anything capable of bringing down the 1% (or .1%, or .01%, or whatever is the actual proportion) will doom the rest of us as well.

I recently completed my 52nd solar orbit, so maybe I will die of natural causes first. As for descendants, I have sired none, and never will.

That may prove to be fortunate.