Lies that silence criticism


I support criticizing Bush, but don't falsify
I've said before I am one of the few libertarians who actually thinks that the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq was necessary.

I've talked about how the Middle East was the dumping ground for U.S. diplomatic toxic waste and how the choices to contain the Soviet Union were the least bad at the time, but proved to have long term consequences. The United States isn't the only one to blame, the United Kingdom added it's own twist to a bad situation.

Basically we created our own Augean stables, one that will require decades of effort to clean up. I'm not making excuses. I said before that the job wouldn't be done until after the first Iraqi children born after the election were old enough to vote themselves.

And that brings up a post I did the other day about lying.

Make no mistake, I believe that the Bush Administration deserves criticism. I believe that the Patriot Act and REAL ID are among the biggest threats to personal liberty that this nation has ever faced. Everything that I have looked at since 9-11 has convinced me that if existing law had been enforced, there would have been no hijackings.

My problem is that the criticisms of President Bush get mixed in with fabrications and lies.

Take the 650,000 estimated Iraqi deaths. It's an estimate, it doesn't agree with any other figures, it's a couple of orders of magnitude greater than the official reports, and it hasn't been verified. Let's not forget that it was a followup to a previous study that was deliberately released in time to influence the 2004 election, and the study's authors have admitted that they wanted to influence the 2006 elections with this study.

Yet it has been reported as fact.

Because this flawed study has been given all the hype, when it is disproved, all criticism about civilian causalities in Iraq will be dismissed as well. In people's minds, it is all tied together, and the validity of one determines the validity of all the others.

This isn't a one time thing. It has happened time and time again during the George W. Bush presidency. Someone will deliberately falsify something about the Bush Administration or something that Bush did or said, there will be a huge push for the President to come clean, it will be considered absolutely critical to the Administration's plans, and then it will collapse.

Effectively shielding the President from any related criticism.

The President actually emerges stronger than before.

If it were something that Karl Rove and the GOP was plotting in secret, that would be one thing. But it is just trying to "get Bush" at any cost. No matter what the intentions, the effect is to build President Bush up, and it is being done by the loudest critics of the Bush Administration.

This is a major problem.

The real issues, the legitimate concerns, get overlooked by the public because they have been burned on the false ones.

The only people still protesting the Patriot Act are the crazy libertarians. The only ones telling you what a threat that Real ID is to your freedom are those lone nuts who believe that individual rights trump the "needs of the State." And it is the creepy gun extremists who will tell you that most of what the Homeland Security department is trying to do could be done more effectively and a lot cheaper by an armed populace who will not surrender their weapons just because the government tells them.

If the past is any guide, even if Democrats were elected this year and Bush was impeached to be replaced with a Democrat, the threats to your freedom would stay the same. The emergency would continue, and would probably be prolonged. The new laws are too good at repressing your freedom while expanding the State.

The modern liberal critics who tell you loudly that "Bush lied and people died" aren't about to surrender the power they crave.

What's more, they have already convinced themselves that lying to you for the "right reasons" is a noble act.

That is an extraordinarily dangerous combination. As the Bush Administration proved, and the Clinton Administration proved before that.

And so on, and so forth.

So if you are going to criticize Bush (or ANY politico), please make sure the facts are on your side.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Sun - October 15, 2006 at 04:20 PM  Tag


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