I Wonder...

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...if the liberals ever get tired of choking on their own words?

Here's Joel Engel in the Weekly Standard explaining- again- how heinous are the charges against the President on pre-war intelligence. What happens if the President had not acted to go to war? It is easy to see...

[[ Well, even if you buy the Democrats' new claim that, as Senator John Kerry said, "This administration misled a nation into war by cherry-picking intelligence," you're inconveniently stuck with the fact that a vast preponderance of that intelligence, rightly or wrongly, pointed unambiguously toward Iraq's status as a rogue state.

Think about this from the president's point of view: Much of the country is calling for your head regarding your alleged failure to prevent 9/11 when no firm intelligence predicted such a thing. Do you really have any choice but to act on the overwhelming amount of clear evidence that says bad things are happening beneath hidden bunkers in Iraq? No. You have no other way out than to fight preemptively. If you don't, well, heaven forbid another attack is made on American soil--with grotesque weapons that came out of Iraq after sanctions were lifted and Saddam's WMD program was reconstituted (as the Duelfur Report later extrapolated).

At his impeachment trial, shortly before conviction, the president would have been made to endure a verbatim recitation of the many dire warnings about Iraq and Saddam Hussein uttered by Democrats Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Sandy Berger, and Madeline Albright. "Iraq is a long way from [here]," Secretary of State Albright said on February 18, 1998, "but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face." ]]

They Left Him No Choice

Next, Jonah Goldberg takes it home with a question: What if Bush did lie?

In it, he also gives a reminder that a certain famous four-term President was much more guilty of duplicity than is George W. Bush.

[[ Indeed, the evidence that FDR lied is far greater than the evidence that Bush did. Charles Beard, arguably the most influential historian of the 20th century — and a very liberal progressive — dedicated the last years of his life to writing about FDR's lies and "Caesarism." Richard Hofstadter, another of the great liberal historians (and a sharp critic of Beard's), also conceded FDR's "undeniably devious leadership" in the months and years before the war. Hofstadter, like countless other historians, had to agree that FDR's diplomacy and politics were designed to push the United States through a "back door into war."

Roosevelt won his unprecedented third election on the vow that he wouldn't send American boys to war: "While I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." This was almost surely a lie.

Now, you might say that Iraq was no WWII, Saddam was no Hitler, and 9/11 was no Pearl Harbor. Those are all fair arguments with varying degrees of merit. But WWII wasn't "the good war" in our hearts until after Pearl Harbor and even until after the Holocaust, and a lot of Hollywood burnishing.

The Bush Doctrine is not chiefly about WMD and never was. Like FDR's vision, it balances democracy, security and morality. Still, the media and anti-Bush partisans have been bizarrely unmoved by the revelations of Hussein's killing fields, his torture chambers for tots and democracy's tangible progress in the Middle East. ]]

The bottom line- and the one fact that is almost always lost- is that we are at war now. Period. We are doing our military absolutely no favors by behaving in this childish and partisan way.

Shame on all of the politicians who are using the war for their own ends.

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