Horny Ol' Clinton Is Now GOP's Buddy?

HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE A COUNTRY SCORN

David Goldblatt wrote an utterly misleading article in the National Review. One that screams Karl Rove is back.

Part of the Bush administration's defense against the Democrats onslaught to pre-war intelligence is to use their Golden Boy, Bill Clinton, against them.

Goldblatt's article is a cacophony of useless eight-year-old quotes attributed to everyone in the Clinton administration from Bubba to Samuel Berger and Madeleine Albright.

None of the quotes call for attacking and occupying Iraq. Of course, it was Clinton's gospel to pursue solutions in a more diplomatic fashion.

So, according to this new Republican logic, the man vilified for his lack of integrity and morality by every conservative in America is now the grand visionary for the backers of this quaint war. Evidently, he couldn't keep his pants on in the Oval Office and impeachment was punishment that befit the crime, but his judgment was sound when it came to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Oh, but wait, goes the apparent logic, Clinton was wrong about the WMD, too and that's the slippery slope coming out of Rove's talking points.

It is from these boldface lies that this administration attacks Democrats who voted for the war by using the argument that they reviewed the exact same intelligence that the neocon cabal in Cheney's office perused.

If this were true, then the dismantling of the entire Senate would be in order. It would mean that nearly every Democratic senator voted for a war in Iraq after looking over documents from CIA that harshly questioned whether WMD existed in Iraq and found the aluminum tubes thought to be used to enrich uranium to be the wrong specs. Democrats in the Senate knew that the possibility of occupation would likely incite a new terrorist enemy and they voted for the war anyway?

No, none of these documents were received by the Democratic leadership only the hawkish rhetoric of mushroom clouds and saving tortured Iraqis and wounded children. Nobody outside of the White House had the raw data that the false intelligence was manufactured from. Democrats did not have the preliminary reports that a captured terrorists claimed a link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein was "highly dubious" by Pentagon analysts. Instead, the report merely passed the information that the fanatically religious bin Laden and the secular Saddam were in cahoots without the extreme doubt included.

The type of blurring that the Republicans are striving would cover the arguments that pre-war intelligence was incorrect and manipulated to be false in the first place. Today they claim the end justifies the means.

Goldblatt makes another point that is eerily similar to a story on Cheney in this week's Time magazine. Goldblatts says:

In the final analysis, of course, the crucial question is not who believed what about Saddam's WMDs but whether the decision to invade Iraq was the right thing to do. It's a question for the history books; a definitive answer is likely a decade away.

In Time a former Administration official put it this way regarding a tale that makes Cheney look unwavering in the face of doubters:

If the VP isn't proven right until after he has kicked off, he's fine with that. The idea of being proved right before the end of his life is a false deadline in his mind. Right is right.

This second tactic basically says Republicans are resigning themselves to the fact that this pre-war intelligence maelstrom is a losing battle in the present. Instead of owning up to the result, they will take their chances with history fate.

Since Bush's big comeback speech on Veteran's Day, there hasn't been any indication that their arguments are swaying any detractors or if its even stopping the bleeding. What Republicans do not understand is that the vast majority of Americans backed this war initially because they gave the President the benefit of the doubt in those trying days after 9/11 despite their reservations.

The tide isn't going to turn just by perpetrating a negative argument. Americans feel betrayed by this president and that sort of anger doesn't subside so easy.