What's even more disgusting is how dishonest the argument that people like AliceMarie try to make with this collection of throwaway quotes that have been floating around the right wing blogosphere for years.

There is not doubt in my mind that AliceMarie was one of those right wing nuts who tried to dismiss the existance of Al Quada in 1998 when they attacked the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.

Rush Limbaugh even specualted on his radio show that the Clinton adminstration made up Osama Bin Laden as a distraction from the discussion of Monica Lewinsky's dress.

Many Democrats, including me, were disgusted that many Democratic elected officials went along with Bush's war plan.

AliceMarie offfers up a bunch of quotes from the late 1990's to suggest that the Clinton adminstration was thinking about starting this war.

She knows this is a lie. Iraq was never mentioned in the 2000 presidential campaign.

But this collection of quotes is even more dishonest then the ususal batch.

Why.

Because it contains quotes (out of context) from both Robert Byrd and Al Gore that seem to support Mr Bush's war.

In fact, this is a complete and very dispicable lie. Not only did both men oppose Mr Bush's war, but both of them voted against it.

They also gave impassioned speeches against it, Gore before the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on September 23, 2002.(note the date!!!!!)

And Robert Byrd on October 3, 2002 (note the date again) in the floor of the US Senate.

Byrd's speech was so impassioned (and as it turned out, so prescient) that the Fox Noise crowd wondered if he had become "unhinged", and adjective they would employ repeatedly whenever their opponants turned out to be right about something and had the courage to stand up and say so.

Alice Marie is right to the extent that many Democrats didn't have the courage to stand up to Mr Bush's war campaign. But he scheduled the vote in front of an election in order to politicize the decision and intimidate resaonable opposition. And the GOP majority could have given Bush his war without a single Democratic vote anyway.

In the end, all of Bush's case for war evaporated. And it eventually became clear that many of his claims were manufactured out of whole cloth by Ahmed Chalabi with the full knowledge of the neo cons on the Pentagon and White House staff.

A year later it would be established that hte White House deliberately used intelligence it knew was false to sell its war.

Regadless of the out of context quotes that alicemarie and her ilk like to throw around, the Iraq war was George W Bush's war.

It turned into the disaster that we predicted that it would. I lived to see every one of my suspicions confirmed.

Alice is a liar. and not a very good one at that.

And, I don't know about the then and now crap, but I never had any doubt what the war George W Bush so desperately wanted in 2003 was all about.

From day one, I knew it was all about oil.

TomFitz wrote the following post at 11/03/2009 2:48 PM:

What's even more disgusting is how dishonest the argument that people like AliceMarie try to make with this collection of throwaway quotes that have been floating around the right wing blogosphere for years.

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Throwaway Quotes? hahahahahahaha!

Now you can WATCH the Throw Away Quotes!

See the footage of Democrats talking about Saddam, his WMD's, and he being a threat to the USA.

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Bill Clinton, Iraq is a problem.

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Clinton warns public about Iraq-alQaeda ties

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Finding video feeds of your out of context claims do not lend them context.

None of these change the essential facts of my post in any way.

Democrats were no clamoring for war in 1998.

The Iraq Liberation Act (generally referred to at the Ahmed Chalabi employment act) was pushed through the Republican Congress by the GOP in an attempt to embarrass Clinton.

The idea that Sadaam may still have had some WMD's was widely accepted conventional wisdom in 1998.

By the time that Bush was clamoring for his unprovoked war in 2002, there were a lot of doubts.

Particularly given the very thin case the White House was making with vague and unsubstantiated intelligence claims (all of which turned out to be fake).

Sadaam capitulated to US demands and allowed the weapons inspectors back in in 2003.

They found nothing, and were on the verge of going public and announcing to the world that there was nothing of note to find when Bush rushed to war.

Subsequently, Bush's own weapons inspectors validated the UN claims. They found nothing beyond a few rusty twenty year old shell casings out in the desert.

Sadaam had dismantled his nuclear program in 1996, a fact that Dick Cheney was aware of when he lied to the American Legion convention in August 2002 and claimed that Iraq was two years away from having the bomb.

Your Weekly Standard article about the alleged Al Quada ties in Sudan have long since been discredited.

Try again.

"They found nothing, and were on the verge of going public and announcing to the world that there was nothing of note to find when Bush rushed to war."

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Thanks for the reinforcement,

I recall the way the right wing media in the US pilloried El Baradi.

They would do that a lot in the period. Particularly if the person involved was telling the inconvenient truth.

They attacked Shalikashvili for warning about too few troops and no plan, He was right, they were wrong.

They attacked El Baredi. A year later, David Kay reached the same conclusion.

They attacked Robert Byrd and Al Gore. They turned out ot be right.

They attacked Joe Wilson's wife because they know Joe Wilson was telling the truth and they couldn't do anything else about it.

The list is a long and inglorious one.

It's pathetic to see these people still trying to pretend that the record is anything but the litany of shame that is became.

Reinforcement?

Maybe you should slow down and read.

I did.

What parts would you like me to read?

"Iraq has on the whole cooperated rather well so far with UNMOVIC in this field. The most important point to make is that access has been provided to all sites we have wanted to inspect and with one exception it has been prompt. We have further had great help in building up the infrastructure of our office in Baghdad and the field office in Mosul. Arrangements and services for our plane and our helicopters have been good. The environment has been workable."

or this:

"As I noted on 14 February, intelligence authorities have claimed that weapons of mass destruction are moved around Iraq by trucks and, in particular, that there are mobile production units for biological weapons. The Iraqi side states that such activities do not exist. Several inspections have taken place at declared and undeclared sites in relation to mobile production facilities. Food testing mobile laboratories and mobile workshops have been seen, as well as large containers with seed processing equipment. No evidence of proscribed activities have so far been found. Iraq is expected to assist in the development of credible ways to conduct random checks of ground transportation."

This relates to claims by the Bush adminstration that the WMD's were being transported around and hidden from inspectors. It also would relate to Colin Powell's presentation to the UN.

None of the Administration's claims in this regard turned out to be true.

"What parts would you like me to read?"

How about all of it?

None of us want an NHS system. We simply want a bettter system for the middle man and universal health care. You can call it what ever the hell you want in your hissy fits, I really dont care.

I did read all of it, as I had in 2003.

If you're going to try and rewrite history to suggest that UN weapons inspectors found anything to justify Bush's mad rush to unnecessary war, don't bother, because it ain't so.

David Kay spent a year going around after the Bush people essentially rant El Baradai out of Iraq, and he didn't find anything either.

Of course, by that time, we had learned that the yellowcake story that Bush told us in the State of the Union adress was a knowing and deliberate lie, and we were learning that the hints and insinuations about Al Quida links were false too, as were the aluminum tubes lie.

You're trying to spin a false tale that suggests that El Baradi found something to justify Bush's claims.

In fact they didn't find anything. The Bush people know this, They tapped El Baradi's phones.

After the war started, and particularly as it became more and more apparant the El Baradi and Hans Blix were right and that the Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld had been crying wolf, the entire might and fury of the American right wing scream machine was unleashed on El Baradi.

El Baradi wasn't concerned. He was right, and he told the truth.

The Bush people could not make that claim.

"I did read all of it, as I had in 2003."

Of course you did.

"If you're going to try and rewrite history to suggest that UN weapons inspectors found anything to justify Bush's mad rush to unnecessary war, don't bother, because it ain't so."

I leave it to others to Monday-morning-quarterback whether the invasion was justified. My point is a simple matter of fact. You asserted the inspectors "found nothing" (your words)-- you are wrong. You further claim that the inspectors (led by Blix, by the way, no El Baradei) "were on the verge of going public and announcing to the world that there was nothing of note to find" which simply isn't possible given both the general matters of cooperation by Iraq and the very specific issues regarding particular weapons clearly identified by Blix in the two reports I cited.

It's clearly not me who wants to "rewrite history."

They found nothing, save a few spent rusty shell casings.

You and I both know it.

I don't know weather the UN weapons inspectors were preparing to go public or not. But it was only a matter of time before they would have to publically announce the the "iminent threat" didn't exist.

The Bush White House knew that, which is why they short circuited the process in 2003 and started the war when they did.

Thier "case" was falling apart before their very eyes.

You can parse all you want to. I watched conservatives try and play this game for three years after the war started.

The fact is that Iraq dismantled its WMD programs after the first Gulf War and their nuclear program in 1996.

The fact is that the White House's yellowcake claim was a deliberatly lie desinged to reinforce another deliberate lie that Cheney had earlier told about Iraq's nuclear program.

They knew that Chalabi was a pied piper. They counted on a quick and easy victory in the hope the people would forget or disregard the fact that they had been scared into supporting an unnecessary war.

But their plan went on the rocks of their own hubris.