By Selwyn Duke
One of the more frustrating frailties of man’s nature is that he is prone to emotionalism and finds it very difficult to be objective. People tend to view others through tinted glasses — either rose-colored or dark — and then see everything their object of adulation or animosity does in that light. A good example of this is the popular fiction that President Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction.
For those who don’t know, I’ve never been a Bush apologist. I think he’s a weak leader (like most we elect) and, contrary to another popular fiction, know him to be a liberal in the mold of 1960s Democrats. I’ve criticized him on a number of occasions and very much doubt I’d be welcome inside the White House any more than personae non gratae Alan Keyes and Tom Tancredo. But there is a difference between reasoned criticism and blind, hateful, irrational prejudice. Now let’s talk about WMDs.
Most of us have heard about the intelligence agencies worldwide that echoed the pre-war Iraq assessment. This isn’t enough for the left, though; I suppose they rationalize that this, too, must be disinformation. But there is something hardly ever mentioned that cannot be rationalized away so easily.
About two or three years ago I was watching Bill Clinton’s secretary of state Madeline Albright address the matter of WMDs in an interview. Here was how she responded to a question about their existence in Iraq (if this isn’t verbatim, it’s extremely close to it),
"We all thought they had them."
Because this doesn’t fit in with the media’s Bush-is-evil narrative, it was essentially buried. What it means, however, is that to believe Bush lied you must also believe that Clinton did, not to mention the various intelligence agencies that concurred with the Iraq assessment (I won’t call it the "Bush assessment" because it’s obvious that his administration was not the first to make it).
So for those of you who have hewed to the Bush-lied mantra, you have to ask if you want to be serious commentators or Michael Moore. If you insist on living in a MoveOn.stupid bubble, wallowing in hatred and spewing venom in a pit of like-minded vipers, no one can help you. No one can force you to live a sincere, examined life.
As for WMDs, it also isn’t true that we found none; we did find them, just not in great quantities. Links to information about this can be found here and here.
Then there are the reports of WMD shipments from Iraq to Syria just prior to our invasion. As to this, I have a source of my own who also tells me that the weapons were in Iraq but then subsequently spirited out. And while I can’t verify this information, I can tell you that I lend this source a lot of credibility.
Just as interesting is this 2006 admission by none other than the New York Times that Iraq was only a year away from developing a nuclear bomb at the time of the invasion (how this got past the Gay Lady’s ideological censors I’ll never know). These are those stubborn things the Shill Media won’t tell you about — I think they’re called facts.
Did all this justify the Iraq venture? Good people can debate that, and I myself have been very critical of the naive democratization policy we’re pursuing in that region (virtually everyone is guilty of embracing it). What cannot be justified, however, is the gratuitous, uncharitable, hateful derision directed at the president, a man who is at worst misguided — and not more so than most of his critics.
And not all those irrational critics are on the left. There are some on the right — although they definitely constitute a fringe — who subscribe to the same kind of nonsense. They will tell us that Bush orchestrated 9/11 and is conspiring to create a one-world government (we are moving closer to one, but it’s due to a spiritual disease, not a conspiracy). Why, one of my readers even stated that he didn’t believe Bush would leave office at the end of his term!
I’ll tell you, whatever Bush is, he must be very hard to peg. Forget about being a man for all seasons. He’s simultaneously too dumb to walk and chew gum at the same time and a Machiavellian Master of the Universe who can orchestrate a takeover of the greatest world power in history. Not only that, he manages to hide these machinations from a media that would revel in his impeachment. Heck, I’ll no longer call the brilliant "Einsteins" and "Sherlocks." I’ll call them "Bushes."
Ah, it always amazes me how many people cannot correctly judge others, saddled as they are with a very poor sense of human nature.
Another reader, one with greater discernment, summed up Bush far better.
He called him "George the Nice."
It’s an apt characterization. I remember seeing Bush serve his secret service detachment barbecue — he did this personally. I think it was at his ranch. Contrast this with how Lady Macbeth used her agents as verbal punching bags, throwing tantrums and hurling profanity at them. Heck, Dubya is a nice guy.
The problem is that we don’t need nice any more than Hillary the Vile. We need strong and moral.
Was Winston Churchill nice? Well, he had those dust-ups with Lady Astor and told a butler who mentioned his rudeness that it was justifiable because, as Churchill put it, "I’m a great man." Yet he was just the leader Britain needed to navigate the darkest days of WWII.
So I will say that George the Nice is naive; he’s a creature of his age.
What I will not say is that he lied.
I’m sure he believes that granting amnesty to invaders, hosting Moslem interlopers in the White House, and prosecuting the Iraq war with kid gloves are nice things to do. Along with Democrat enablers and like-minded Republicans, he’s taking us down a road to Hell. But it is one paved with only the best of intentions.
This isn’t much consolation to those of us who must watch our civilization slain by the purveyors of faux compassion, but we shouldn’t blame Bush. We are in the grip of lies, but those of men, not a man. Ask yourself why good candidates such as Alan Keyes can’t get to first base when running for president. Oh, because they’re too politically incorrect? That tells the tale.
We have a habit of asking, "Where are all the leaders?" But they exist. A better question is: Where are all the followers?
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