by Molly Ivors
There's an old saying that "success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan." If there were no other evidence, the war in Iraq can now officially be considered a clusterfuck, since it's clearly been abandoned in a rest stop toilet while its progenitors attempt to speed away, free.
Whoa, buddy. You know how fast you were going? And this kid says he knows you.
Even conservatives are laughing at the patent bullshit of Newsweek columnist Karl Rove's assertion that his beloved swaggering cowboy never had any intention of going to war, but that big bad old Democratic Congress made him do it.
Umm, yeah. I'm basically supportive of Dems, but if 2007 has taught us anything, it's that "bully" isn't in their vocabulary. Nor is "standing up to creeping fascism" or "defending the Constitution" (with a few notable exceptions).
If only there were some means by which one might check what actually, you know, might have happened at some time in the past... some sort of device designed to record a person talking or speaking, hell, even a means of using an implement--a sharpened stick, perhaps--to make marks which might later be interpreted. Oh, well. I guess we'll just have to go with memory.
Fuck you, Karl.
And everybody chuckles: Oh, there's Karl with another lie again! He's such a stitch!
Compare this to the immediate fact-checking of Bill Clinton when he insists that he "was against the Iraq War from the beginning." Of course, he's campaigning for Hillary, and she doesn't really want to adopt this brat either, even though she once gave it a cookie. But if Bill Clinton is anything, it's deliberate in his speech--he supported the AUMF and the right of Cowboy George to sabre-rattle, but not the invasion itself. From 2007, that may seem like a bullshit response, but in 2003, it was where a lot of people stood. Not me or Thers, but a lot of people.
And sorry, but I think this is a pretty valid point: "it would have been inappropriate at the time for him, a former president, to oppose — in a direct, full-throated manner — the sitting president’s military decision." Those who smeared Clinton as "wagging the dog" when he attempted to take out bin Laden might have shown similar restraint.
It's worth noting too that Clinton's assertion came, not as a comment on the war, but as a comment on inequitable taxation rates and the fact no one is being asked to pay for it.
Mr. Clinton’s remark yesterday came in the context of opposition to Republican-backed tax cuts for wealthy Americans like himself, and how that loss of revenue affected financing for the military.
“Even though I approved of Afghanistan and opposed Iraq from the beginning, I still resent that I was not asked or given the opportunity to support those soldiers,” Mr. Clinton said.
That's the news here: that this war is bankrupting our nation and our children and will continue to do so for generations to come. I'm no economist, but a recession and a housing crunch on top of a war paid for with credit cards can't be good thing. Bill Clinton was clear about the issue yesterday: it's 1992 again, and it's The Economy, Stupid. And endless war is a luxury we can no longer afford.
Hillary Clinton voted for the AUMF. She was lied to. So were we all. I'm not wholly unsympathetic to the "I could see through the bullshit; why couldn't she?" argument, but I think a lot of people, in those weird, heady days when plenty of people were on a patriotism bender, made similar, and often worse mistakes. I do think she needs to come up with at least as clear a vision of how to Get the Fuck Out as John Kerry did in 2004, since, if anything, the situation is more desperate, less tenable now than it was then. She also needs to shed Colin Powell, who mentored unindicted traitor Richard Armitage and drove a big fucking water truck for this war.
It's a sign of the state of our discourse that an ex-head of state and presumptive First Fella is held to a higher standard of honesty than the architect of the modern neocon resurgence with a list of bullshit titles as long as your arm, all designed to keep him in the White House and on the government teat. That he's now given space in a major news weekly to spew his brand of disingenuous crap is icing on the cake.
Remind me again: why do Republicans get to lie with impunity?