Required Reading...

Exonerating Bush, Point-By-Point
By: MICHAEL P. TREMOGLIE, Special To The Evening Bulletin
09/01/2006

Another smear campaign/conspiracy theory/myth about the Bush administration has been pretty much debunked. For three years now, Joe Wilson, Democrats, communists and the liberal media have been saying that Karl Rove should be indicted and imprisoned for revealing the name of a CIA operative in order to discredit Wilson.
Chris Mathews, one of the leading proponents of this conspiracy theory, acted as Rove's judge, jury and executioner. He insisted that Rove was the source. We now know this was not the case - and never was. It was a former State Department official who inadvertently disclosed the information
One by one, the conspiracy theories and allegations of lying, made by a coalition of liberals, communists, Democrats and Buchananites, have been discredited. The investigations, so desired by them, have exonerated President Bush.

Listed here are some of the more notable false accusations made against the Bush administration along with the names of notable proponents - in parentheses - and the facts.
These are:
False accusation #1: The 2000 election was stolen with the help of the Supreme Court. A corollary to this was that blacks were disenfranchised. (Congressional Black Caucus, Michael Moore, the World Socialist Web Site).
Truth: Independent audits by newspapers, antipathetic to Bush being president, revealed that he would have won the election if the recount continued. An investigation by the U.S. Commission for Civil Rights reported, "(The Commission) does not find that the highest officials of the state conspired to disenfranchise voters." [1]

False accusation #2: Bush knew about 9-11 in advance and did nothing to prevent it because he wanted to invade Iraq (Howard Dean, Georgia Congresswomen Cynthia McKinney).
Truth: This one is so bizarre that - to quote Orwell, "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."
This is merely a recycled conspiracy theory from World War II. Then, people claimed FDR knew about Pearl Harbor and did nothing because he wanted an excuse to enter World War II.

False accusation #3: The war was meant to distract from a bad economy (Democratic National Committee).
Truth: The economic boom - during which more blacks own houses than ever before, and there is less child poverty among blacks than ever before - is more a function of the Bush tax cuts and the housing market.

False accusation #4: Bush secretly conspired to whisk Saudis out of the country by authorizing them to fly in the days following 9-11 when no one else, "not even the FBI," could fly (Michael Moore, Vanity Fair).
Truth: The 9-11 commission and my own independent investigation have invalidated this. The day the Saudis flew was the day all commercial flights resumed.

False accusation #5: Bush and Cheney encouraged the CIA to exaggerate the intelligence about Iraq to win favor of war (Chris Matthews).
Truth: The Senate Select Intelligence Committee - and other sources - said that this was not the case. Only Senator Carl Levin, ironically, a hawk about Iraq during the Clinton years, is still trying to insist this is true.

False accusation #6: Bush lied when he claimed during his 2003 State of the Union address, " The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." (Joe Wilson, Tom Daschle)
Truth: In 2004, the Financial Times reported that European intelligence units stated that Iraq was seeking uranium. An independent inquiry about this by a British commission confirmed that there was an attempt by Iraq to purchase uranium from Niger. The Senate Select Intelligence Committee confirmed that this was true as well.

False accusation #7: The Bush administration is in league with Enron and Halliburton and invaded Iraq to annex their oil reserves (Senator Ted Kennedy, Workers World Party, Revolutionary Communist Party).
Truth: It was well known that the former Treasury Secretary during the Clinton administration, Paul Rubin, made the call to Paul O'Neill, the Bush administration Treasury Secretary, to do a favor for Enron when Enron was going bankrupt. It is the Bush administration that has been prosecuting Enron executives for crimes committed during the Clinton years.
The only people profiting from Iraqi oil were those who opposed the war. Hussein was paying the French, the Russians and others who opposed the war, bribes by funds from the U.N. Oil-for-Food program instead of paying for food and medicine for sick and starving Iraqi kids.

False accusation #8: The Iraq war was a personal vendetta by George W. Bush because of Saddam Hussein's attempt to assassinate his father in 1993 (LA Times Robert Scheer).
Truth: Considering all the other reasons proffered, this is rather a non sequitur. However, even if true, would not another state's plot to assassinate the President of the United States be considered an act of war?

False accusation #9: Bush lied about a relationship between al-Qaida and Iraq (MoveOn.org, Michael Moore, Revolutionary Communist Party, Workers World Party, The New York Times, Democratic National Committee).
Truth: There have been reports of cooperation between the two in the media and by government for years. Knight-Ridder, ABC, Newsweek all previously reported this during the 1990's. Clinton's CIA Directors James Woolsey, John Deustch and George Tenet also said so. The 9-11 Commission also said there were contacts - stipulating they were not operational ones. Recently, in March of this year, former Democrat Senator and 9-11 Commissioner, Bob Kerry said recent captured documents indicate a much more collaborative relationship between al-Qaida and Iraq.
The DemocratVice Chair of the 9-11 Commission said that there was no discrepancy between what Cheney said and the Commission's preliminary report. There were reports that Iraq sent instructors to Afghanistan to teach al-Qaida terrorists. It is intrinsically a fallacy to claim Bush lied when years of evidence by various sources told him al-Qaida and Iraq were linked.

False accusation #10: The war is a plot by a cabal of Neocon imperialists to develop an American empire and protect Israel (Columnists Pat Buchanan and Georgie Anne Geyer, Atlanta Journal and Constitution).
Truth: This theory is another redux of a World War II conspiracy theory - the Jewish cabal-FDR theory.

False accusation #11: Bush's tax cuts and the war in Iraq caused funding to be cut for levee construction, and this caused the levees to break and the flooding of New Orleans (Clinton adviser Sydney Blumenthal, Will Bunch, Phila. Daily News).
The truth is, during a Sept. 1, 2005 interview with Lt General Strock, the Chief of Engineers, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Strock said, "Let me also address the issue of the general impact of the war in Iraq on civil works funding. We've seen some suggestions that our budget has been affected by the war. I can also say that I do not see that to be the case. If you look at the historical levels of funding for the Corps of Engineers from the pre-war levels back to 1992, '91, before we actually got into this, you'll see that the level of funding has been fairly stable throughout that period. So I think we would see that our funding levels would have dropped off if that were the case; so I do not see that as an issue that is relevant to the discussion of the flood protection of the City of New Orleans." During that same interview, Al Naomi, Senior Project Manager for the New Orleans District Corps of Engineers, said, " we would have had to start work on Category 5 protection 20 or 25 years ago to have had in place to effectuate any differences in what happened with this storm."

The propaganda machine of this coalition of liberals, communists, Democrats and Buchananite conservatives began manufacturing lies about the president since the 2000 election. They are every bit as sophisticated at disinformation as the KGB was during the Cold War.
All the investigations discredited these absurd allegations. Unfortunately, the debunking of the lies never got the media prominence the allegation did - with the exception of the Dan Rather episode.
It is rather sad that Democrats have chosen to use all the worse political tactics of their party has used throughout its long history rather than their best.
It was some Democrats, who later came to be known as "Copperheads," referring to the snake that strikes without warning, who tried to subvert President Lincoln's policies during the Civil War. These Northerners, who were sympathetic to the Southern slaveholders, were so egregious in their opposition to the Civil War that many actively gave support to the Confederacy - much like many of today's so-called " antiwar" protesters actively support the enemy, such as Lynne Stewart, who was convicted of aiding terrorists and Ramsey Clark, who is a counsel for Saddam Hussein.
There was a time in America when politics ended at the water's edge. There was a time in America when an American president could respond to his political opponents' vicious criticism without the media criticizing him for doing so.
Perhaps the greatest irony about the criticism of President Bush is that it implies Bush is committing treason, yet when Bush responds to his critics, they bray at being called unpatriotic by the President, even though he is doing no such thing.
President Bush's political enemies can legitimately criticize his policies for many reasons. The fact that they have to resort to lies, conspiracy theories and distortions leads one to believe that they are totally lacking any constructive and intelligent policies or inititatives.


Michael Tremoglie is the author of A Sense of Duty.
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