"Where were the questions when Clinton blew up an aspirin factory? Where were the questions when Clinton sent cruise missiles into Iraq? "
Well, if Clinton was still President we would be talking about Clinton, but because Bush is President, lets talk about Bush, shall we? I know the idea of scrutinizing Bush makes some people so uncomfortable that they can’t bear it, and must change the subject to Clinton, but let’s try to deal with the here and now, okay?
First of all, the State of the Union address is the most important speech that the President gives, and is an account of where America is at, a report card to the taxpayers if you will. So to include information that is false (and will be proven that it was known to be false) is not some minor slip of the tongue.
The President LIED. Was he the origin of the lie? No, but he repeated a lie. That makes him a liar. He can try to pass it off on bad intelligence, but he said it. This is a speach that is worked on for months in advance, not something he throws together the night before. The CIA advised them to lose that Africa claim, and someone in the White House weasled it back in.
Also, this Niger-Uranium lie is not the only lie told by the Bush White House:
-Donald Rumsefeld claimed on Meet the Press that HE KNEW exactly where to find the WMDs a few days before the invasion.
-Condoleeza Rice claimed that Iraq’s aluminum tubes were specifically intended for creating WMDs, which is false. They can’t be used for creating WMDs.
-The two trailers which supposedly are bio-weapons labs. False.
-The staged rescue of Private Lynch was phoney.
-The toppling of the Saddam statue by “throngs of Iraqis” was staged for US television, and only a few dozen Iraqi misfits were there, not even a couple of hundred.
-That the post-attack costs would be 2 billion per month… they are DOUBLE that.
-That the Iraqis would welcome us with open arms.
-That Saddam has some of the “most lethal WMDs” known to man, according to Bush. The most lethal WMDs are nukes, and nobody claims that Saddam had nukes now that we are in Iraq. The idea that Iraq might have actually had a nuke is laughable now.
I know what the responses will be, Saddam is a bad guy and the woirld is a better place without him. I agree! What I don’t agree with and never agreed with is the US rushing to invade Iraq in violation of international law, in defiance of the UN security council’s wishes, without support from a broad range of allies (and I don’t mean Tahiti). The Iraq invasion was planned YEARS before 9-11 by members of the current Defense Department, in fact they were proposing an attack on Iraq before Bush was even elected (the Project for the New American Century, look it up, it is all right there on their web site).
Now this has turned into a partisan issue somehow, where criticizing the president for lying is what Democrats do, and defending the president against any criticism even when it is warranted is what Republicans do. SICK!!! Who the hell can justify misleading Congress and the US citizens?
(Except Fox News commentator Ollie North, who lied to Congress under oath, about the arms smuggling during the Iran-Contra affair. How the hell can Fox put him on the air?)