True Lies

This is interesting: while the clinically insane wing of the smoking remnants of the Republican party pump out conspiracy theories about Obama like two-dollar gasoline, their brethren on the right ignore actual evidence of actual lies. Lies you don't need to make up on your own. Lies that are already out there, lies that led to the death more more than a hundred thousand, maimed our troops, cost us a couple thousand billions of dollars, and materially added to our current economic calamity. Turns out, not only did George W. Bush lie about the reasons for invading Iraq, he's been lying about his role ever since. In his upcoming book, Colin Powell says as much:

In a chapter discussing what he calls his “infamous” February 2003 speech to the United Nations where he authoritatively presented what was later exposed as gross misinformation about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Powell notes that by that time, war “was approaching.”

“By then, the President did not think war could be avoided,” Powell writes. “He had crossed the line in his own mind, even though the NSC [National Security Council] had never met -- and never would meet -- to discuss the decision.”

[...]

Bush insisted in his own 2010 memoir, "Decision Points," that the invasion was something he came to support only reluctantly and after a long period of reflection. During his book tour, he even cast himself as “a dissenting voice” in the run-up to war. “I didn't wanna use force,” he said.

But Powell supports the increasingly well-documented conclusion that there was actually no decision-making point -- or decision-making process -- during the events between the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, which had nothing to do with those attacks.

Former CIA Director George Tenet made an admission similar to Powell’s in his own 2007 memoir. "There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat," he wrote. Nor "was there ever a significant discussion" about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion.

Indeed, history shows that Bush had long wanted to strike out at Saddam Hussein and was trying to link Iraq to 9/11 within a day of the terrorist attacks.

[...]

An analysis of the historical record by the National Security Archives in 2010 concluded that, “In contrast to an extensive record of planning for actual military operations, there is no record that President George W. Bush ever made a considered decision for war...”

I suppose it's not so hard to understand. The truth of their failures and the depth of their deception is so great that none on the right can really face it. Instead, their leaders have played a game of hide-the-ball, and at their fringes, where the failures are abraded even more by the image of that black guy smiling back, they've wallowed within one conspiracy after another, and fallen into the black hole of their own minds, from which no light can escape.

Meanwhile, as the craziest of the right-wing crazies endlessly ply the still waters of their fevered minds, seeing a terrorist-lover in the White House, Bush's war becomes -- as if it weren't obvious from the beginning -- the greatest gift Iran has received since Reagan sold them weapons.

We're truly in a world where sense has become inverted. As Obama picks off al Queda leaders like skeet, the RWS™ continues to see him as a terrorist-planted America-hater; while the guy who undeniably -- no crazy conspiracies needed -- weakened our country to the point of near-collapse, and whose reckless decision to invade Iraq has strengthened our enemies escapes any mention at all. Especially by The Rominee, while quietly putting the band back together, ready not only to foist upon us yet again the failed Bush-league economic policies, but his gang of neocon blunderers, too, as if nothing ever happened.

But the tinfoil-hatted, happy to stew in the broth of their own bamboozlement, see nothing there, nothing at all. Which, of course, is the point: someone feeds them this stuff, knowing they'll gulp it down, happy in their ginned-up hate, looking away. Gee. Wonder who that might be.

[Updated: here's another way of saying the same thing: unwillingness to take responsibility. For anything.]