Talking Points = Lie

Here's a shorthand version of the Republicans daily talking points bulletin: LIE. Telling a lie over and over again has been a very successful tactic of this administration. In a blatant example yesterday, Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security adviser, stated on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer" that the facts that have shown Bush and Cheney misled the country into war were "flat wrong." What rabbit hole did this guy climb out of? "We need to put this debate behind us," he said. Yeah, if I got caught telling a series of blatant lies that caused thousands of deaths, I'd want people to forget it, too. He then had the unmitigated gall to say, "It's unfair to the country. It's unfair to the men and women in uniform risking their lives to make this country safe." Yeah, isn't it a little unfair to the 2,000 plus US soldiers who have died for a lie, too. It gets worse...Hadley said the intelligence Bush used to push for war"was roughly the same intelligence that the Clinton administration saw. They drew the conclusion that Saddam Hussein was a threat to peace, that he had weapons of mass destruction. They acted against him militarily in 1998," Hadley said, referring to the administration of Bill Clinton, a Democrat. Yeah, remember all the thousands of US troops and Iraqi civilians that were killed under Clinton's measured response?
John Edwards also wrote in yesterday's Washington Post, "The argument for going to war with Iraq was based on intelligence that we now know was inaccurate," Edwards wrote. "The information the American people were hearing from the president -- and that I was being given by our intelligence community -- wasn't the whole story. Had I known this at the time, I never would have voted for this war." Shorthand version of Edwards position: Bush lied to rush the nation into an unnecessary war. If John Kerry had repeated this statement forcefully 13 months ago, he would be President today.