Now They’re Lying about Lying

Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman was on Meet the Press yesterday. I keep wondering if one of our guys looked like Mehlman, would his ever-present sneer and inadvertent blowing out of his cheeks when he says a word starting with “P” irritate me the way Mehlman irritates me? Mehlman has injected irritating into every facet of his persona. It’s his tell. How do we know when Ken Mehlman is lying? He’s irritating. Mehlman is the brains behind the GOP talking points for defending the war in Iraq. And he has absolute faith in the premise that a lie will eventually be accepted as true if it is told often enough. The current oft-told tale as perfected by Ken Mehlman is that everyone in Congress was bamboozled by the same faulty intelligence as the White House when the US voted to attack Iraq. Lie! Lie! Lie! The White House spread the faulty intelligence knowing it was faulty. There was no other intelligence being disseminated except the faulty intelligence promulgated by the White House. The big sin is that the White House knew it was faulty. Never forget and never let anyone else forget that Colin Powell stood up at the UN and told lies he knew were lies. Whether individual congressmen voted to attack Iraq is not important. It’s important that those congressmen who did vote to attack Iraq did so on the strength of faulty intelligence which the White House knew was untrue. And that is the crux and the crime of the entire catastrophe in Iraq. Two-thousand and sixty-seven American soldiers have died in Iraq. Fifteen-thousand-five-hundred and sixty-eight American soldiers have been wounded in Iraq. All the deaths, maiming and destruction in Iraq have been caused by lies knowingly spread by the Bush administration in order to justify its vision of US global supremacy.