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.