Or, you know — not.
But why let a little truth ruin such a catchy little bumpersticker refrain?
After all, if progressives can’t get together at rallies and shout dubious rhyming slogans with impunity, the terrorists will have already won…
(thanks to JHo)
I still think that it’s likely that a lot of WMD was removed before the invasion.
Bush made a strategic error in going with the WMD angle, and by letting all other reasons for the invasion fall by the wayside instead of keeping them in the forefront. However, we have long ago concluded, I think, that he did not do a good job handling the media.
Ultimately, you go with the intelligence you have, which may not be completely accurate. In this case, it apparently was not accurate. Republicans, even spendy-spenders like Bush, cannot be forgiven for any decision. Even if the WMD had been there in abundance, progressives would have latched on to some other reason to call him a liar and to use the same bumper-sticker slogan.
He didn’t. The press simply refused to give the other reasons much attention, probably because they couldn’t understand them.
This is an absolute truth.
What really ticked the progressives off was seeing one of their own — another intellectual heir to Naziism — removed from power.
– You know it would be a waste of time to try to even broach the subject with anyone from the hard Left. They’ll all go to their graves clutching the “Bush lied” canard in their gnarled little Marxist fingers.
I agree with Crawford. The resolution included quite a number of issues. The left press seized on one, and tenaciously hoped to disprove it so that they could justify running a counterinsurgency against their own country’s efforts.
It was revolting, and is likely one of the causes of the death of much of the mainstream press, in retrospect.
I need to learn to write better. I know Bush put forth other reasons in the resolution, but he sure as hell didn’t try to reinforce that later, did he?
Yes, unless they found a missile as big as Teddy K’s head, these idiots would never admit to wmd.
I believe George W. kept liberty in the forefront of the operation. Hence Operation Iraqi Freedom.
(absolutely no snark intended)
I remember a time pre-Iraq when the mendoucheous leftists were arguing that President Bush had too many reasons, and was just making them up as they went along.
There was a time, alp, when Hope seemed to ooze out of your ass. What happened?
Hey Jeff,
Did you see that interview of Bush by Mark Zuckerberg in front of the Facebook staff? You can practically feel the hatred in the audience of Bush in the beginning, but by the end you can tell they began to realize the media-fed image of Bush was completely wrong and made he wasn’t just a stupid cowboy.
Video here for those interested, it’s fascinating.
http://www.gotchamediablog.com/2010/11/mark-zuckerberg-interviews-george-w.html
I’m too stupid to comment here I think. Today, at least.
I’m schilling for GWB for a while. I’ll go back to the hope poop. You can’t pin me down.
“It was revolting, and is likely one of the causes of the death of much of the mainstream press, in retrospect.”
Ayup.
Times before (sorry, couldn’t resist), the media would harp, and there could be little argument. Too bad for them, any dumbbell now can easily open a browser and find in seconds what Bush actually said, and post it in immediate response.
It’s hard to get people to pay for lies.
I’m too stupid to comment here I think. Today, at least.
Ain’t no way I’m letting you move in on my territory cranky. Don’t even try.
Hadn’t see that, Tman. Will watch today.
Watch the whole thing Jeff, it’s totally worth it. You can tell Zuckerberg has a lot of respect for GW, much to the massive dismay of his staff. And Bush STILL maintains his silence in criticizing Obama. Kudos to the GW.
I guess now that it has been leaked, I can at least mention when I was in Iraq, those rounds with the chem agent, mentioned in the summer of 2008 – sure made me a wee bit nervous at the time I saw that report. Of course, I was traveling the country a bit then, so I was not looking forward to running into Mr. IED and Mr. CHEM at the same time.
Of course, I take my security clearance seriously, so I wasn’t running around bellowing about this on leftie sites or at morons like alphie on this site…. sigh. The price of holding one’s tongue, I guess.
– LTC, I hear you. Being connected in any way with the truth on the ground in real time makes the Big lie campaigns almost insufferable to watch at times. You want to just reach out and strangle a few scrawny necks, but having principles is never easy. If it was the Left would be doing it.
Recall the Wolfowitz Vanity Fair interview, touching on the bureaucratic cause of settling on WMD:
The whole wikileaks thing again proves the stunning incompetence of government. Yet, progressives will never see the document leak for the damning indictment against government that it is.
………………………..
sferr, I’ve long understood the ME would have become Saddam’s bitch if he every acquired nuclear weapons.
I think Wolfowitz said much the same thing, but in terms safe for viewers at home.
If past performance is indicative of future behavior, then Bush and the rest of the western countries had every reason to be concerned. As far as I know he was the only modern head of state to purposefully use chemical weapons on his own people, since the second world war.
Even if he was bluffing, Saddam was holding a gun against the heads of the people of his country. We’d have been foolish to think that gun was unloaded.
Jeff used three dots in that final elipsis, but since it’s the end rather than the middle, it should be four dots.
GOLDSTEIN MISPUNCTUATED! PEOPLE WERE HATED!
or something.
</LLL>
Ah, how things do fall down the Memory Hole. The ME was already pretty much Saddam’s bitch. This is one of the reasons the mullahs of Iran wanted nuclear weapons.
Saddam had the biggest and best-trained army in the ME, and wasn’t in the least bashful about reminding people of that, along with dark hints about what might happen if people, you know, got crosswise with him… It helped a lot that Bush I didn’t finish the job, because S. Hussein could claim he ran the Americans off by pure force of personality, which he regularly did. It also helped quite a bit that he’d fought the Iranians — a much stronger and more prosperous society, even with the mullahs in charge — to pretty much a standstill on their own territory. All that gave him a lot of weight to throw around, and he did so with gusto.
Then the Americans came back, contrary to Saddam’s bluster; perhaps it wasn’t the sheer admiration of his awesome might that kept the infidels off. Then they walked over the biggest, baddest, best trained, and best equipped army in the ME as if it weren’t there, which caused both satisfaction and consternation in all kinds of places, not all of them predictable (especially by leftoid procedures). Among other things, Ayatollah Khameni and fellows reasoned thusly:
1) Saddam almost knocked our army down on our territory;
2) The Americans were barely inconvenienced by Saddam’s Army;
3) THEREFORE if the Americans come after us — OSHITOSHITOSHIT! Nukes NOW!
Then the Americans did what Americans always do, and nobody is ever able to anticipate or figure out: They picked their defeated enemies, the Iraqi army, up, dusted off their clothes, and said kindly, “Hey, you got beat ’cause you’re doing it wrong. Let us show you how to do it right.”
And the mullahs went apeshit. Saddam almost beat them with his army; they were now faced with the possibility that someday an Iraqi army trained up to, say, a third to a half of American capability headed for Tehran, with LTC John & Friends sitting under beach umbrellas sipping drinks with bits of fruit on little sticks in, watching, cheering, and offering advice. OSHITOSHITOSHIT!, or however you say that in Farsi. (I still think that’s a possibility, though a remote one, and I’ll betcha the mullahs do, too.)
That left “assymetrical warfare”, and Khameni & Co. turned to with a will, aided by fools (Muqtada al-Sadr and others), Shi’ia fanatics, and Western leftoids including the “news” organizations, whose determination to take Bush and the Bitter Clingers down a peg meshed perfectly with the mullahs’ intent to weaken the Americans. The rest, as they say, is General Science — or maybe Social Studies; anyway, one of those boring freshman-in-high-school thangs.
Regards,
Ric
I still don’t understand why a career-hungry federal prosecutor didn’t make Code Pink his bitch for giving money and supplies to the jihadis in Fallujah. I guess the dangers of pissing off their Democrat sponsors were more than the gains from putting life-long smiles on the faces of Americans.
Crawford, one of the things we’ve learned to our regret (well, my regret anyway) in the last few years is that we don’t have a Department of Justice. What we have is a Department of Social Justice that takes its orders from the leftoid wing of the Democratic Party regardless of who the President is, and which takes as its first order of business Bringing Down The Man, i.e. white males who are not Democrats.
No member of the Do(S)J who might contemplate “making Code Pink his bitch” could ever reach the rank of prosecutor in the first place.
Regards,
Ric
Ric,
Of course, that doesn’t stop the leftist internet tough buys from claiming (boasting?) that the Iranian military would “wipe us out” if we dared cross their border.
Of course, this same zit brigade claims we’ve been “run out of Iraq with our tails between our legs”, and are being “utterly destroyed” in Afghanistan, “the graveyard of empires” (the Taliban now calling for a “timeout” notwithstanding).
Yeah, I troll some whacky web forums when I’m bored…
Oof. “buys” = “guys”…
The left never seems to see things the way they really are.
soros would say buys
Didn’t the whole “Bush Lied” meme start with the infamous 16 words in his 2003 SOTU address — “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” — and Joe Wilson’s assertion that it was a lie, because he’d sipped tea in Niger on the CIA’s nickel and knew Saddam hadn’t been trying to buy uranium there? Honestly, I never could figure that one out, unless some were so geographically retarded that they thought Niger = Africa.
Ric,
You go from inspiring (#24) to discouraging (#26) in an eye blink amigo.
More of the former please 8^).
Oh and Ditto to LTC John! F*&^ing (insert JD’s best denouncement, happyfeet’s ragiest rage and Bob’s heaviest vowel strike here) Lefties!!!
“Bush Lied, People Died” started because it frelling rhymes and progressives love them some rhymey-rhymes that fit on bumperstickers. They decided which “lie” to attach it to after the fact.
Having said that, I think Swen is correct on the origins. However, recall that I’m not all that bright.
“Hey, you got beat ’cause you’re doing it wrong. Let us show you how to do it right.”
Heh. You just described MNSTC-I’s mission in a nutshell. And the Iraqis, for all their flaws, did a pretty good job of listening. Of course, getting walloped twice in the span of 1989-2003 by us, made them think “say, these Americans may have something here.”
As we used to say, “everyone wants to be like Mike” (old Jordan/Gatorade ad reference).
now that the IA is spinning up on M1 tanks, etc., I would suspect more than one sphincter in Tehrans is clenching.
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