Lies and Dem Lies
David Limbaugh has an excellent article up at Townhall.com countering the Democratic Party's attacks on President Bush and his administration's recent speeches on the Global War on Terror. He points out how the Dems claim Bush & Co. are politicising the war. It's an excellent piece. Here's the summary of counterpoints at the end:
-- They said Bush attacked Iraq "unilaterally," when he built a coalition of over 30 nations, including Great Britain and tried hard to persuade the rest of Old Europe to join. To their discredit, they refused. A unilateralist wouldn't have bothered.
-- They deny Iraq is part of the war on terror, never mind that terrorists demonstrably disagree. Never mind that the Bush Doctrine clearly defines the enemy to include terrorist-sponsoring nations, like Saddam's Iraq.
-- They claim Bush asserted a connection between Saddam and 9/11, when he explicitly said otherwise. He said Saddam had close ties to terrorists, including Al Qaeda and the Taliban, which is undeniably true and which Democrats also persist in falsely denying. Indeed, Iraq was on Clinton's watch list of terrorist nations.
-- They say Bush called Iraq an "imminent threat," when he called it a "great and gathering threat." The Bush Doctrine called for attacking threatening nations before they could become an imminent threat, when it would be too late. But some anti-war Democrats, like Jay Rockefeller, did call Iraq an "imminent threat."
-- They say Bush's sole reason to attack Iraq was its WMD. In fact, David Horowitz notes there were 23 "whereas" clauses in the Iraq War resolution, only two of which mentioned WMD and 12 of which concerned Saddam's violations of U.N. resolutions.
-- They say they were duped into voting for the resolution by administration hype on WMD. But the intelligence Congress received in the National Intelligence Estimate was much less alarmist and more nuanced than the intelligence the president received in the Presidential Daily Briefings. But, hey, they had to give their anti-war base some excuse.
-- They say we had Osama surrounded in Tora Bora and let him go, outsourcing the job of capturing him to Afghan warlords so we could pursue our quixotic junket in Iraq. General Tommy Franks put the lie to all of this malicious nonsense.
-- On the hyped Wilson/Plame nonscandal -- don't get me started.
-- Most unforgivably, they've lied in painting President Bush as a liar on Iraqi WMD.
-- There's much more -- like their simultaneous condemnation and advocacy of preemptive strikes -- but no space left.
