AUSTIN
-- Now it's getting funnier and funnier. There is an elephant in the living
room and we're sitting around having a conversation about whether there's
an elephant in the living room.
"I think there's an elephant in the living room."
"Well, there's a lot of elephant poop around, but that doesn't prove
there's an elephant in the living room."
The entire Republican Party is shocked (!) anyone would think that Karl
Rove (!!) would leak a story to damage a political opponent. Oh, the horror.
And Karl has always been such a sweet guy. Just to give you an idea, one
time Rove was displeased with the job done by a political advance man
and said, "We will f--- him. Do you hear me? We will f--- him. We
will ruin him. Like no one has ever f---ed him!" (From an article
by Ron Suskind). And that was a guy who was on his side.
Attacking an opponent's wife is standard operating procedure for Rove.
Have Republicans actually convinced themselves that he wouldn't do such
a thing? People, sometimes party loyalty asks too much.
Actually, we are missing the point here. The point being that Joseph Wilson
is merely one of the many people who provided one of the by now innumerable
pieces of evidence that this administration lied about why we went to
war in Iraq. When former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill wrote that Bush
planned to invade Iraq from the day he took office, the administration
went after O'Neill. When Richard Clarke disclosed that the Bushies wanted
to use Sept. 11 to go after Saddam Hussein from Sept. 12 on, they went
after Clarke. They went after Gen. Zinni, they went after Gen. Shinseki
and everyone else who opposed the folly or told the truth about it. After
they got done lying about weapons of mass destruction and about connections
to Al Qaeda, they switched to the stomach-churning pretense that we had
done it all for democracy. Urp.
We suffer the worst attack on this country since Pearl Harbor, and the
Bush administration sends the FBI after the American Civil Liberties Union.
The ACLU exists to protect every citizen's rights as defined in the Bill
of Rights in the Constitution of the United States. The ACLU works solely
through the legal system: It does not advocate violence, terrorism or
any other damn thing except the Bill of Rights. Since when is that extremist?
Why in the name of heaven are we wasting the FBI's time on this idiocy?
I don't pretend to be an expert on counter-terrorism, but if it were up
to me, I wouldn't start looking for the violence-prone in pacifist groups
either. Your pacifists, you see -- oh, just look it up.
I know that sludge-for-brains like Bill O'Reilly attack the ACLU for being
"un-American," but when Bill O'Reilly's constitutional rights
are violated, the ACLU will stand up for him just like they did for Oliver
North, Communists, the KKK, atheists, movement conservatives and everyone
else they've defended over the years. The premise is easily understood:
If the government can take away one person's rights, it can take away
everyone's.
We are living in a time when our government is investigating an organization
that stands for the highest and best American ideals. And claiming the
mantle of patriotism while they are about it. This is cuckoo -- and such
an idiotic waste of the FBI's time and the taxpayers' money that whoever
thought up this idiocy should be fired yesterday.
But even that is superseded by what lies at the heart of Plamegate and
that is lying in order to get this country into war. If the Washington
press corps had a memory bank longer than 10 minutes, they could have
exposed this years ago: the lies so often directly contradict one another.
Before the war, the CIA was such a wussy organization it kept trying to
downplay weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: After the war, it was all
the CIA's fault, they had exaggerated the weapons of mass destruction.
And so on and so on.
The trouble with piling lies on top of lies is that we can't even agree
on facts anymore. I read the right-wing commentators, and it's not that
we're not on the same page -- we're not even in the same library. They
read the Downing Street memos and convince themselves they don't mean
what they say. I really don't understand: Is it that hard to admit you're
wrong when you're wrong? Is it that hard to admit that the invasion of
Iraq has been a disaster? Isn't it self-evident?
If you support someone politically, you are not required to believe they
are perfect. Did I think Bill Clinton had a sleazy affair while he was
president? Yes. I just didn't care. I didn't think it had anything to
do with the way he was running the country. You can't dismiss this. You
can't not care about lies and war. Not if you care about American soldiers.
