So now we know how President Bush and the Republicans plan to spend their obscene $200 million uncontested-primary-season war chest: By repeating lies.
Today’s New York Times reports on the first Bush campaign ads that are scheduled to run beginning this Sunday in Iowa. Predictably, the ads extol Bush for his “strong and principled leadership,” suggest that the Democrats are calling “for us to retreat, putting our national security in the hands of others,” and “urge viewers to tell Congress ‘to support the president’s policy of pre-emptive self defense.’ “
But the most outrageous claim — one truly Orwellian in its rhetorical sleight-of-hand — is a line that reads, “Some are now attacking the president for attacking the terrorists.” (So much for all the claims Bush once made that he would not play politics with the “war on terrorism.”)
Now, there are probably some people who have “attacked the president for attacking the terrorists” — meaning, criticized the president’s response to 9/11 in going after Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. But there aren’t many. None of Bush’s leading rivals among the Democrats are among them. Nor are the vast majority of Democrats. When “attacking the terrorists” really meant attacking the terrorists — when it meant trying to apprehend the people responsible for the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden and his sponsors — America and its allies were as close to united as they have ever been. (Bush’s postwar failures in Afghanistan are another story. And bin Laden and Mullah Omar are still at large. Wait — I hope saying that doesn’t count as “attacking the president for attacking the terrorists”!)
What “some are now attacking the president for,” of course, is not for “attacking the terrorists” but for his foolhardy and foundering invasion of Iraq. The president’s Iraq policy is now hurting him politically, given the utter collapse of the administration’s case for the war and the continuing carnage in the post-war war. So the Karl Rove prescription now emerges: (a) Revive the lie that preceded the war — the equation of Saddam Hussein with 9/11’s al-Qaida plotters; (b) ignore the many ways it has been discredited; (c) repeat until re-elected.
Rove’s thinking is cunning: After all, if the pre-war bluster was successful in persuading two-thirds of the American people that Saddam was responsible for 9/11, why shouldn’t the Republicans keep playing that card for all it’s worth? Turn “The Terrorists” into an all-purpose bogeyman: The President is attacking The Terrorists. If you attack the president, you’re helping The Terrorists. Case closed. Election won.
The scary thing is, it has a good chance of working.
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