Loyalty to the Truth or Loyalty to the GOP?
Jul 19 at 5:05pm by Anonymous
If, as former White House counsel John Dean explained a few weeks ago in an interview, there is “no chance” the Republican house would impeach Bush for lying to the American people, the nation has transcended mere blind partisan politics and entered a time of living fiction. This is the same Republican Party whose members badgered and hounded President Clinton until he was caught in a lie. His prosecutors, the legions of right-wing radio listeners, organizations dedicated to unearthing damaging material on Clinton’s past, showed a disgust for immorality in the White House. But when Clinton’s impeachment came, the vast majority of Americans refused to march on Washington demanding his removal from office. In fact a few went so far to march in his support. Americans, both for and against President Clinton, knew in their hearts, if not minds, that the question he was asked should have never been asked because it involved his personal life; not his public life.
Now, the situation has reversed. We have an unelected president who lies to the American people and the world, sacrifices innocent American and Iraqi lives to create a distraction from his disastrous ineptitude at home. This president can’t poke his head out in public without an angry crowd forming.
Still, the Republicans are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. The Republicans I know, the little rank and file footsoldiers who spent the late 1990s jeering at President Clinton, can’t defend Bush themselves. Something about American commonsense knows a high crime from a misdemeanor. No group, except possibly for American soldiers and Iraqi civilians, can feel as betrayed as Bush’s reluctant pre-war WMD believers. They shouted that anyone who stood against the war was a yellow, cowardly Quisling. They said any argument against the war represented pin-headed, politically-correct handwringing.
Now, of course, even if WMD were found it would be hard to prove they were of an imminent threat to US troops. So we continue to ask where are the WMDs? Where is justification for this elective war?
Yet, there is still no call for his impeachment.
If nothing else, we need no more proof that the witchhunt to bring down President Clinton had nothing to with moral outrage and everything to do with undermining the legitimacy of an elected president. Rightwing radicals who feel so sure about themselves they can seek to bring down an elected US president are an unsettling group. They feel like “the consent of the governed” means an expensive PR effort and spin job to deflect criticism. They have a religious conviction in their own arrogance and supremacy. They have no ideal other than the consolidation of power.
But what of their political strategy that depends so heavily on lies? What personal friend of yours would forgive such constant lies? What business partner? Most Americans parents don’t tolerate lies from their children. Why makes excuses for it from a Bush?
The lies, if tolerated by the American people, or the Republicans in Congress say a lot about our country today. For the people, you could say we live in a fact-free culture of images, of sensation. (Think of the images of Bush’s aircraft landing versus the realities it masked). One where lies, assertions, spin and advertising language go unchallenged. For the Republicans in Congress, it says party loyalty means more than truth, more than justice, more than integrity. In fact, integrity for them is measured by uncritical loyalty. In this way they are more akin to a street gang or crime family than a political party. Of course, in a healthy society both street gangs and crime families are considered a public problem to be rehabilitated or prosecuted.
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Whoops! Sorry about all those lies we presented as fact…
Apr 15 at 1:01pm by Jagwire X
Washington Post tells a different story for the record. Turns out there was no uprising underway.
People in Basra Contest Official View of Siege
Life Was Mostly Normal, Residents Say; Doctors Report Many Civilians Killed
By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, April 15, 2003; Page A13
BASRA,
Iraq — There was nothing resembling a popular uprising against the Iraqi militiamen who controlled this city during its 13-day siege by British forces. Life continued largely as normal in many neighborhoods, with police directing traffic and residents doing their best to avoid fighting.
Doctors at local hospitals treated scores of civilians wounded by British artillery and U.S. bombs during the siege, despite briefing-room claims of pinpoint accuracy. Many others were killed.
These conclusions about life under siege emerge from a week of interviews in Basra and they differ in many ways from accounts offered by military and other sources before the city’s fall. Reports of large numbers of Basra residents being forced to take up arms and militiamen firing from behind human shields were similarly not borne out in the interviews.
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