As Iraq seems to finally (and predictably) be imploding this week, longtime Republican apologists in this country are returning from their wingnut ghettos to mainstream spotlights once again to pretend this isn’t the result of their unprecedented disaster of a criminal foreign policy.
Naturally, even eleven years later, they are still lying to themselves and everyone else about the Bush Administration and the Iraq War, including: The reasons we attacked the country, who did and didn’t support the war of choice and why, and what role the entire clusterfuck of a disastrous pointless mess has played in our continuing American history.
Among the best and briefest responses to the newly invigorated round of Bush-era apologia disguised as (naturally, misleading and/or fact-free) Obama-era ‘told-ya-so-isms’, comes from Kurt Eichenwald on Twitter…
Conservs are right. We should stay in Iraq 4 centuries. Deaths of 1000s more soldiers is a small price 2 avoid amitting we screwd up in 2003
— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) June 12, 2014
But for a more specific, point-by-point response, please see Oliver Willis’ “11 Years and Thousands Of Lives Later, Conservatives Are Still Lying About The Iraq War” published yesterday.
Willis disembowels severalk of the renewed Rightwing history rewrites — or, as he describes them, “their false assertions about the war they built, prosecuted, lost and covered up” — as each is being dusted off over the past 48 hours or so by the same long-ago discredited and disreputable con-artists and scoundrels who invented the debacle that broke our country (and so many others) in the first place, before going on to spend years and unspeakable blood and treasure attempting to justify it all.
Among the specific Rightwing myths and insidious contortions of fact being trotted out again, before being expressly disabused and/or accurately corrected by Willis:
- The Iraq War was a good idea.
- Everybody supported invading Iraq.
- Both Democrats and Republicans went to war in Iraq.
- But Bill Clinton signed the Iraqi Liberation Act.
- Current and former members of the Obama administration voted for war in Iraq.
- People die in war all the time. You can’t blame Bush.
- The media opposed the war.
My only disagreement with Willis’ response to all of the above: His insistence on describing these Republican extremists, liars and con-artists as “conservatives”. They are anything but. That said, he’s hardly the only non-Rightwinger who has long made the mistake of allowing Republicanists a once-respectable-ish nomenclature which they never deserved (and, usually, were quite the opposite of.)
Please go read Willis’ piece. Unfortunately, his helpful reminders may be coming in all too handy once again in the coming days…
UPDATE: Oops. Truth about the War on Iraq slips through on air today on Fox ‘News’, courtesy of Shepard Smith. Watch…
bush, cheney, and their war mongers are all dicks — they may not go around telling everyone, like paul ryan, that people routinely mistake them for anthony weiner’s penis, but they are dicks none-the-less.
Mabus. The 3rd anti christ. Responsible for a million + innocent lives. Just like the 2 before him”¦mabus, spin the ma to a gw and add an h. No friggin doubt about it!
I’m asking people to stop calling it the Iraq War and instead refer to it as the Bush War in Iraq.
As far as I’m concerned, voting for both wars and The (so-called) “Patriot Act” is enough of a reason to be against Hillary Clinton for President. Add to that the eight years she and Bill spent selling out the rest of us to Wall St. and other powerful interests, and you have my reasons for standing against her candidacy with my dying breath. Leaving the Presidency blank on a ballot is preferable to giving even tacit approval (“What choice did I have?”) to her. You can always under vote, which I will do, if I do not have a third party choice.
If anything, Oliver could have expanded a bit more in his piece that the war in Iraq not only did not attain the bogus objectives under which the US went in, but has in fact directly contributed to the rise of militant Islamism and Al Qaeda, in Iraq in particular, and throughout the region generally. In other words, the Bush war in Iraq directly led to the opposite of its stated objectives – greater instability instead of more stability in Iraq, greater and ongoing bloodshed with Iraq, and *increased* influence of Al Qaeda and related extremism amongst Iraqis and other Muslims in the region, who did not see Americans as liberators, but as infidel invaders to be repulsed. The Bush war in Iraq could hardly have gifted Osama bin Laden more than by creating tens (hundreds?) of thousands of new converts to radical Islam, who see America as the great Satan, and will carry on bin Laden’s agenda against US interests.
For some reason we’re getting free HBO, so we saw the 06/13/14 edition of Real Time with Bill Maher. Another right wing empty-headed pundit with a British accent, Tom Rogan was there, and during the discussion, he said, “He (Saddam Hussein) was not a big supporter of Al-Qaeda.”
For God’s sake, effing son-of-a-bitch, really?
Of all people, sitting right next to Mr. Rogan, was Richard Clarke with hair half burned off from it being on fire during the first half of the Cheney-Rumsfeld administration. Mr. Clarke barely got in a correction saying something like, “He was not a supporter at all” before the discussion was closed. Do you think that did any good? I sure as f*ck don’t think it did.
Calm down, everybody. The proliferation of these Neocon jerks on TV is not all bad. Do they raise your blood pressure? Is your rage-meter pegged? Do you shout out loud to the TV whenever you see that old fart McCain loser spouting war on TV? Is your memory of the huge Bush idiocy and the war lies refreshed? Good! All in time for the 2014 elections. All I want to say, is: Please proceed, Republicans. 🙂 Even some of the more intelligent Republicans are starting to say, “Put a sock in it!”