Instead of a thousand people named on an enemies list, we now have well over a million names on that enemies list. and this time they are not allowed to fly or enjoy a private phone call.

This time we are told there are no tapes and we do not have a Judiciary Committee in either house of Congress to demand the evidence that surely is sitting in the White House.

This time when we are told by a top “insider” that Iraq was being planned long before 9/11, no one does anything about it. (see Paul O’neil’s book)

This time there is and has been open theft of government funds by the Vice-President and his old company–the theft of billions and billions of dollars of tax dollars and nothing is done. The last Vice-President caught steeling-and the theft amounted to only a few thousand dollars in bribes–he was hounded out of office and into disgrace.

In Nixon’s Administration scores of executive employes were convicted and sent to jail for lying to congress. This time when the President’s men lie openly, nothing is done. Hell, half the time they do not even show up to give any testimony.

Rummy and Cheney learned their lessons and swore that justice would never prevail again in the White House and they won.

I am afraid that Bugliosi–whom I admire greatly and who is now surely on the greatest enemies list since the time of Stalin–is wrong. Bush and Cheney and Rummy will live out the end of their lives in complete ease and comfort.

Hundreds of felons will go free, felons who have committed crimes thousands of times greater than anyone standing on street corners selling grass.

It’s easy to say that in retrospect, but we should try to put ourselves back in the mood of the country in 2002 as this whole sad drama began. We were a wounded nation, with our paranoia being fed by terrorist Code Orange alerts and by Bush & Co. suggesting another attack was just around the corner. How could we NOT react in the face of such news when, lo and behold, we are informed by our forthright president that Saddam is not only hording WMD’s, but he is passing nuclear fissile material to Al-Qaeda? Put it a different way–what if this news HAD been true and we had done nothing, could we have lived with ourselves if Al-Qaeda had nuked an American city as a result? Of course not–and so something had to be done according to the information that was given.

The best you can do is the best you can do—and the best we could do at the time was based on the false information we were given. That’s true too of Congress. How could Edwards and Hillary NOT have voted as they did even if they did not have the motive of appearing strong vs. Arabs? You may recall the Dem. party was in dreadful danger of being branded as milquetoast weak on terrorism in those days, which would have been the kiss of death politically. There is NO WAY these politicians could have voted against evidence that everyone believed to be true.

That’s why I blame Bush for being the disseminator of lies–not the politicians that fell for them.

I’d probably feel less like this, though, if our Presidents since Reagan (maybe even Nixon) hadn’t used Presidential privilege to hide things from the country and the world. It’s basically a good idea ruined by decades of abuse.

Something like this, however–willfully and repeatedly promoting false intelligence to prod us into an unneeded and unjustifiable war–is not acceptable, nor will it ever be.

Thank you,

Dave

However, I see that as radically different from what we’re talking about here.

Sheesh.

Arguably, the lie’s newfound legitimacy can be traced back to the shameless disavowals with which Ronald Reagan graced the Iran-Contra commission. Never mind that not knowing what’s going on in your own backyard is at least as pathetic as the actual crime. “I don’t know” and “I can’t remember” have since been cited by indicted government officials and business executives as if they were passages of Scripture.

People expect to be lied to, and, when it serves their purposes, are happy to believe those lies.

I hope to God that someday, when historians discuss the awful legacy of Bush’s lies, they won’t have some asshole popping up and saying “But Clinton did XYZ!”

But I doubt it.

I wish I could say that this would finally put to bed the idea that there is some kind of moral equivalence between Clinton lying once or even 10 times about Monica and Bush lying about Iraq. It should, but it won’t.

A new study documents in gory detail the number of times Bush and his crew lied about our reasons for going to war with Iraq. But we can’t dismiss the responsibility of everyone who willingly believed the lie….