"Bush Lied" is a Lie

There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the mainstream press over the lack of civility in today's politics. Dinesh D'Souza correctly notes that such incivility usually results when the values and rhetoric of fringe groups enter the mainstream of political discourse. This is what happened when the Left's charge that "Bush lied" was adopted by mainstream Democrats.

If you want to know how the Iraq debate got so acrimonious, the tipping point was when mainstream Democrats went from accusing Bush of bungling the Iraq war to accusing him of lying to get America into that war. His crime, at this point, became not merely one of error but one of deliberate deception. The basic liberal reasoning is that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, therefore Bush has been misleading the American people all along.

At one time these charges of lying were restricted to the political left. In the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, The Nation claimed that Bush went to war based on “falsehoods and deceptions.” Al Franken took the charge a step further, alleging that “the President loves to lie.” Activist Cindy Sheehan insisted, “My son died for lies. George Bush lied to us and he knew he was lying.”

But of late even mainstream Democrats have started to talk this way.

Read it here.

Dinesh has a point, a good one. Accusations that "Bush lied" are unfounded and poison the political atmosphere. Like many other presidents before him, Bush made a tough decision based in part on information that turned out to be wrong, but there is no evidence to support any contention that he acted in bad faith. To argue that he did so is itself a despicable lie promulgated by left-wing loons.

The willingness of main-stream Democrats to engage, as a matter of political expediency, in such calumny is not only disappointing. It undermines the entire political process and promotes the kind of vitriolic discourse that so many decry.