Lying What We Lie Now...

Honestly, I have only one, slight disagreement with the estimable Mr. Fallows here:

Now, the little history lesson. I am reinforcing a point already made in different ways by Peter Beinart for The Atlantic, Steve Benen for the Maddow Show blog, Greg Sargent in the WaPo, and Paul Krugman in the NY Times. But it is so very important, and in so much danger of being swamped by the current “Knowing what we know...” bomfog, that I feel I have to weigh in.

• The “knowing what we know” question presumes that the Bush Administration and the U.S. public were in the role of impartial jurors, or good-faith strategic decision-makers, who while carefully weighing the evidence were (unfortunately) pushed toward a decision to invade, because the best-available information at the time indicated that there was an imminent WMD threat.

• That view is entirely false.

• The war was going to happen. The WMD claims were the result of the need to find a case for the war, rather than the other way around. Paul Krugman is exactly right when he says:

The Iraq war wasn’t an innocent mistake, a venture undertaken on the basis of intelligence that turned out to be wrong. America invaded Iraq because the Bush administration wanted a war. The public justifications for the invasion were nothing but pretexts, and falsified pretexts at that.

This is blunter than I usually sound. Why am I putting it this way? I laid out as many details as I could in my book Blind Into Baghdad, and in an Atlantic article with the same name and one called “Bush’s Lost Year.”

...

I would correct Mr. Fallows in one particular: in addition to "Peter Beinart for The Atlantic, Steve Benen for the Maddow Show blog, Greg Sargent in the WaPo, and Paul Krugman in the NY Times" I would add "...and most of what remains of the once mighty Liberal blogosphere has been all over this shiznit for the last decade, including driftglass, who has specialized in patiently vivisected the lies of David Brooks and Company almost every day for the past 10 years."

Sorry I don't have so much as a byline or occasional guest column in a major dead tree publication, James.

Lord knows I've tried :-)

And I don't mean to sound peevish.

But it is vexing to watch from the bleacher seats a national, Liberal conversation that boils down to "Can you believe these fucking Conservatives trying to get away with rewriting history?",  and which pivots in no small measure on the perjured testimony of Mr. David Brooks.