Bush is NOT a Liar

(A Guest Essay by my astute friend Eva Sorock)

GOP candidates have their slogan for the 2006 election. Here’s a reprise of the headline above: Bush is NOT a liar. These five words need to be repeated often so that they finally sink into the jellyfish-like American consciousness. I calculate that it will take about 13,765,450 iterations of the slogan to counteract the brain washing the American public has undergone since the Mediocrats moved on from fuming about chads shortly after September 11, 2001. Actually, I admit that number is made up, but for the last 2000 or so days I have heard that Bush lied at least twice a day from mushy, fair-weather Republican friends; about 10 times per day from ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN (and I don’t watch the main-stream media regularly); five times more per day in newspapers or the 6^th grade level news magazines (Time and Newsweek – which I view only at doctor or dental appointments of course), and at least once per day from a person in my family (who can be defined as someone currently experiencing mental torture at an American university.)

Lest we forget what he is said to have misled us about, it comes down to two big (boring at this point, but that does not stop them) lies: 1) WMDs and 2) the connection between Saddam Hussein and terrorists. Blah, blah, blah. After all, those were never the only reasons the U.S. initiated a pre-emptive strike on Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz explained it way back before he joined the Bush administration. The strategy always was, and still is, to attempt to build a viable democracy in the Middle East that will inspire citizens living under despots and insane dictators to rise up and fight for their independence. Why? Because democracies tend to be more stable and peace loving than dictatorships. Why Iraq? It has always been the likeliest candidate for democracy: a country with an educated, secular, well-to-do middle class – unlike most of its neighbors. Case closed and hard to refute – but then it turned out to be easier to argue that Bush lied about WMDs and the terrorist connection.

Something remarkable has happened during the last few weeks; the U.S. government has finally begun releasing documents our GIs captured in Iraq and posting these documents on an Army website. (See Laurie Mylroie’s op.ed. in the Wall Street Journal on March 27, 2006.) The documents chronicle nothing less than Saddam Hussein’s contacts with the Taliban and Al Qaeda beginning in the 1990s and provide evidence that he made and stored anthrax and mustard gas – small amounts, but enough to supply terrorists heading out on a field trip to attack innocent civilians. It’s still very early in the process of translating and analyzing the Iraqi documents, but it looks like Republicans, if they take the initiative, maybe able to make some political hay in 2006.