From the LA Times [1] this morning:
In 2006, John F. Kerry explained the Senate’s 77-23 passage of the Iraq war resolution this way: “We were misled. We were given evidence that was not true.” On the campaign trail, Hillary Rodham Clinton dodged blame for her pro-war vote by claiming that “the mistakes were made by this president, who misled this country and this Congress.”
Nearly every prominent Democrat in the country has repeated some version of this charge, and the notion that the Bush administration deceived the American people has become the accepted narrative of how we went to war.
Yet in spite of all the accusations of White House “manipulation” — that it pressured intelligence analysts into connecting Hussein and Al Qaeda and concocted evidence about weapons of mass destruction — administration critics continually demonstrate an inability to distinguish making claims based on flawed intelligence from knowingly propagating falsehoods.
In 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously approved a report acknowledging that it “did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments.” The following year, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report similarly found “no indication that the intelligence community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.”
Nothing short of amazing that Jim Kirchick, the author, still has a job at the Times. Better yet:
In 2003, top Senate Democrats — not just Rockefeller but also Carl Levin, Clinton, Kerry and others — sounded just as alarmist. Conveniently, this month’s report, titled “Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information,” includes only statements by the executive branch. Had it scrutinized public statements of Democrats on the Intelligence, Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees — who have access to the same intelligence information as the president and his chief advisors — many senators would be unable to distinguish their own words from what they today characterize as warmongering.
Wll, yes, there is that. And these are points we’ve been making here since that time. Not that these facts are going to put a dent in Democrat ranting. Consider that the chief purvayor of Democrat rants, Barrack Obama has the nomination based on an accomplishment list so thin as to be laughable, and you begin to understand that facts bother Democrats not at all; Facts are by no means what Democrats base their bumper-sticker positions in.
As an example: Boortz [2], today:
Have you seen this delicious little quote from Pennsylvania Democrat Congressman Paul Kanjorski? Even better, watch the video [3].Why it would seem that Mr. Kanjorski is admitting that the Democrats lied about what was going on in Iraq during the 2006 mid-term elections? Here’s his quote:
“I’ll tell you my impression. We really in this last election, when I say we … the Democrats … that if we won the Congressional elections we could stop the war. Now anybody was a good student of government would know that wasn’t true. But you know … the temptation to want to win back the Congress … we sort of stretched the facts, and the people ate it up.”
How nice.
Ain’t it real.
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