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John Hinderaker of Powerline, quoting Michael Barone, quoting Mr. Hinderaker (is that circular enough?): But here's one point Hinderaker comes up with [Ed.: Actually, Deacon made this point first] that I had not thought of and, as far as I know, no one else has raised either. "If the administration knew Saddam didn't have. . . weapons [of mass destruction], then it also knew its 'pretext' would be exposed as soon as the invasion was complete. No one would be dumb enough to go to war on the basis of a claim that was not only wrong but would quickly be shown to be wrong." Sister Toldjah has expended a significant amount of bandwidth reminding her readers that the Democrats, including the then President of the United States (who presumably had access to all classified information), all accepted the intelligence assessments that Iraq still had, and was probably working on additional, banned weapons. She has noted, more than once, that if President Bush lied (meaning; knowingly made false statements) about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, so did the Democrats, including President Clinton. That ought to be blatantly obvious, and if no one had previously raised the point Mr. Hinderaker and Paul Mirengoff (the Deacon) raised, it is because Republicans thought it to be so obvious to anyone with any common sense that it didn’t need to be said. (There’s an anti-Semitic undercurrent out there suggesting that the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, knew the information was false, but not only kept that from the United States and the United Kingdom, but deliberately fed false information to the CIA, to get the US to take out Iraq, but that’s the subject of a future article.) So, why are the Democrats trying to make such an issue of this? After all, if it is somehow proven that President Bush knew there were no WMD in In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda members … It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. Hillary Clinton, October 10, 2002 Mr. Mirengoff has the beginning of an answer: Driving down an incumbent president's popularity can only help the out-of-power party. I think the Democrats will do at least marginally better in both 2006 and 2008 if Bush is viewed unfavorably and if the Republican party is seen as the party that deceitfully took us to war in the name of WMD that didn't exist. In any event, when a president is fighting a war that's perceived as not going well, and a primary justification for the war hasn't materialized, it's asking too much of any party (and certainly the Democrats) not to make an issue out of it. The Democrats have found a low risk strategy for doing so. If Mr. Mirengoff is right (and I think that he is), such a strategy can be low-risk if and only if the Democrats are assuming that the voters are just plain stupid. Former President Clinton told everyone that yes, All that the Democrats have is the fact that no WMD were found in After all, there are plenty of people out there telling the voters the same thing this poor site has said, that the Democrats implying that President Bush knowingly lied on this simply makes no sense, and that there is so much evidence to the contrary, out there and easily available, that the Democrats’ strategy makes sense only if they believe that the voters are stupid. It is, in effect, simply another version of the Big Lie technique: if they repeat it loudly enough and often enough, it will come to be taken as the truth. It’s going to be the obligation of the conservatives to make certain that the lie is challenged. Posted by Dana
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