The Jonah Goldberg column I'm linking to isn't new, but then neither is the "Bush is a liar" canard. The presumptive yet reluctant Democrat nominee for the 2004 Presidential race laments the "failure of this president to show that he can lead our country with the truth." Sadly, Mr. Kerry wouldn't know truth if Bill Clinton told it to him.
Opposition to the war in Iraq started with the trivial yet disproportionately reported protests of fringe anti-war wackos, having grown from the protests by an insignificant number of ultra-fringe wackos over action in Afghanistan. The ahistorical coverage of the war elevated the hand-wringing of anti-liberty ideologues into a major plank in the Dem platform. Now that JFK's Great Depression analogy has been obviated by economic vitality, anti-American defeatism is all he has left. Given this, the 'Bush is evil' forces have no alternative than to claim victory in Iraq equals defeat, and that fiction equals fact.
This isn't much of a stretch for post-modern liberals trained in the art of relativism and multiple realities. Speaking of Kenneth Pollack, liberal author of "The Threatening Storm" which made the case for war in Iraq, fellow liberal George Packer said "What he got wrong he got wrong because the intelligence was mistaken. What the administration got wrong it got wrong because it didn't care about the intelligence." Speaking of the unanimity of belief before the war that Iraq had WMD, including the likes of Gephardt, Daschle, Wes Clark, both Clintons, Gore, Kerry, Putin, Chirac and Schroeder, liberal talking-head Bill Press recently singled out Bush as a liar because, unlike these pillars of reasoned judgment, he "took us to war based on those beliefs."
But as Goldberg so obviously points out, "For Bush to have lied, he had to have known that there were no WMDs, right? It's not a lie unless you know the truth. If you say something you think is true that later turns out to be false, we don't call that a "lie," we call that a "mistake." You could look it up."
Goldberg surmises: "Packer says Pollack's mistake was based on the best intelligence available; however, Bush & Co are a bunch of bloodthirsty ideologues or greedy liars or both." "This encapsulates pretty much everything that's wrong with even the White House's most respected critics: a nearly total inability to consider the possibility that this administration operated in good faith."
Bill Press also rolls out another nouveau liberal explanation, namely, "I do not hate George W. Bush." Instead, he merely despises everything the president thinks, does, or stands for. Yeah, and he supports the troops too, but not their mission. Yet Press and those like him are the very people who expect to be taken at face value when they call other people liars.
Posted by JohnGalt at June 18, 2004 10:57 AM