How Do We Know Karl Rove Is Lying?

First, as is my wont, and, as I see it, my duty, let me remind you: Everything that is going wrong right now in the world, in the USA, in your city, in my city and in our back yards is due to the malfeasance, misconduct, and crimes of the Bush administrations from 2000 through 2008. Do not forget that. There, that done, back to Karl Rove. Karl Rove, the man with the title of being President George W. Bush’s senior adviser and deputy chief of staff during the Bush years, has just come out with a book, “Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight”. Now let’s all stop being coy and acting like we didn’t know what was going on while GWB held the title “president”. For eight years, Karl Rove was the president of the United States. So when Rove writes a book which is a defense of George W. Bush’s presidency, Rove is defending himself. And how do we know there are major lies in Rove’s book? The book is by Karl Rove, what other evidence do we need? But also, Rove is telling the same lies he told while he was president and, according to the review in the New York Times this morning by Peter Baker, apparently Rove has added some new lies. “For the most part,” Baker writes of Rove’s memoir, “his book is an unapologetic defense of Mr. Bush and his presidency, and takes aim at Democrats, the news media and others for what he describes as hypocrisy, deceit and vanity.” According to Baker, Rove writes that “the White House” genuinely believed the reports about Weapons of Mass Destruction. He asks and answers the question, “Would the Iraq War have occurred without W.M.D.? I doubt it...Congress was very unlikely to have supported the use-of-force resolution without the W.M.D. threat. The Bush administration itself would probably have sought other ways to constrain Saddam, bring about regime change, and deal with Iraq’s horrendous human rights violations.” No, Mr. Rove, that last sentence is total sophistry—it sounds plausible but it is total bullshit. The first goal of the Bush administration was to take over Iraq by force. The second goal of the Bush administration was to kill Saddam Hussein because he was powerful. The rhetoric about regime change and human rights violations was thrown into the mix to justify attacking a small country that the US feared might pose a threat in the future and whose oil we wanted immediately. When Rove says “the White House” he means Karl Rove and Rove’s minions. But even if he meant George W. Bush, it rings hollow. GWB could not and did not think a cogent thought for eight years, due to being an idiot and to his medications for, among other things, being an idiot. Rove asks and answers two more questions: “So, then, did Bush lie us into war? Absolutely not.” Baker reports that Rove says the White House had only a “weak response” to the harmful allegation, which became “a poison-tipped dagger aimed at the heart of the Bush presidency.” “So who was responsible for the failure to respond? I was. I should have stepped forward, rung the warning bell and pressed for full-scale response. I didn’t. Preoccupied with the coming campaign and the pressure of the daily schedule in the West Wing, I did not see how damaging this assault was.” Oh please! That’s not the point. The point is, and Rove should have said, “I did not see how damaging this assault was to my plan. I thought we’d bamboozled the entire world." Dubya supposedly is writing a memoir called “Decisions”. But it’s not out yet. The ghostwriters no doubt needed to see how the ventriloquist would rewrite history before tackling the dummy’s version. Now that Rove’s book is out, The Decider’s deciders can decide which lies to print and which lies to let lie.