I just got a comment on another post where the author wrote:

Lots of information, talking about all the lies, but I puzzelled. Only Rebublicans lie! Democrats are truthfull, sincere and upright.

Ach! His sarcastic arrows fly to my very soul!

Yeah, I’m pretty obsessed with right-wing lies, and Bush administration lies in particular, lately. But that doesn’t mean I don’t realize that the large majority of politicians in both parties, once they’ve bubbled up to the level of operating in Washington, have only a casual acquaintance with the truth. And as I said in my reply to the above comment, if you dig back far enough in the site’s archives, to pieces written during the Clinton presidency, you’ll find pieces discussing his lies, too.

But really, the view of reality that someone gets if he only consumes right-wing media (which I suspect might be the case with this commenter) is pretty warped. Many of those folks in fact operate under the fallacy he sarcastically accused me of using: That only the other side lies or is evil. Our own guys are absolutely true and pure. Which is a mistaken belief regardless of which side you’re on.

Anyway, in the interest of giving some time to the other side’s viewpoint, I hereby link to the following from John Hawkins of Right Wing News: Debunking 8 anti-war myths about the conflict in Iraq. Donald Sensing suggested that everyone should read it, so I did.

It’s mostly garbage. For example, its lead myth (George Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq) is debunked mainly by asserting the “Democrats believed Saddam had WMD, too” line. He quotes Hillary’s statement from the October 2002 Senate debate over the use-of-force authorization — a debate that was conducted in the context of the infamous CIA white paper on Iraq’s WMD capabilities and ties to terrorism.

Nice logic: If Hillary says something is true, George Bush cannot possibly be guilty of lying about it! Um, okay.

Look: You can believe George Bush was an unwitting stooge of bad intelligence if you want to (though your implicit argument — that an unwitting stooge is the best we can hope for in a president — still has a few holes). But I, personally, do not believe that. Bush sexed up the intelligence on Saddam’s WMD bigtime. You were here at the time. You saw that process with your own eyes, heard it with your own ears. If you choose to ignore that now, that’s your prerogative. But I don’t have to give your conclusions any weight.

And I don’t.

This entry was posted by jbc on Thursday, July 14th, 2005 at 7:32 am and is filed under war. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.