Pushing Back Against "Bush Lied"

Although it is true that the Republicans direct all three branches of government and the political power that goes with it, they do not own the culture, the media, and the academy. And the do not own the rank and file that actually do the work in the governments of the nation.

That is why the Democrats can successfully operate a campaign of deceit like the ongoing “Bush Lied” campaign, the accusation that Bush lied the nation into the Iraq war.

But any thoughtful student of political affairs would have observed how carefully the Bush administration built its justification in the months leading up to the Iraq war. You could tell that every sentence had been carefully parsed, probably in light of the Vietnam experience, so that its meaning could be justified by the facts and analysis to hand at the time.

And anyway, how come the left started the “Bush Lied” campaign even before the Iraq invasion. Did they know something that we didn’t know? Or were they merely taking their cues from their handlers? And who were they?

Pundit Michael Barone takes aim at the “Bush Lied” folks.

The propagators of the big lie against President Bush are trying to delegitimize not only him, but all the progress due to Iraq, progress toward freedom for Middle Easterners and toward a Middle East that no longer threatens the United States.

The tactics of the Democrats in the last decade have been openly obstructionist, issuing, one supposes, from the rage at being displaced from the center of power, first in 1980, then in 1994, and most humiliating of all, in the dead-heat election of 2000. You can understand why. It’s about power.

Their whole existence and reason for being is bound up in the continuance of the 30 percent of GDP that they have built up into a vast patronage machine over the last century. Now the chickens are coming home to roost: a vast government machine that does not do very much with a lot of money; unsustainable entitlement programs; privileges and subsidies that are threatened by the new global economic order.

The only thing that Democrats have thought to do about their strategic position is to counterattack, whether it is Social Security, tax cuts, Hurricane Katrina, or Iraq. They can get away with it because the mainstream media lets them get away with it. Imagine Republicans attacking a Democratic president and blocking his program. The mainstream media would make the Republicans into mean-spirited monsters. (Oh yes, they did.)

Sooner or later, Democrats will have to think of something smarter than mindless obstruction. But it doesn’t look as though that will happen any time soon.

And that is a pity. Because the American people are going to have to pay the bill.