[Mb-civic] We're Missing The Point

[Linda Hassler]

 We're Missing the Point
    By Molly Ivins
      Creators Syndicate

       Tuesday 19 July 2005

      Austin - Now it's getting funnier and funnier. There is an 
elephant in the living room and we're sitting around having a 
conversation about whether there's an elephant in the living room.

      "I think there's an elephant in the living room."

      "Well, there's a lot of elephant poop around, but that doesn't 
prove there's an elephant in the living room."

      The entire Republican Party is shocked (!) anyone would think that 
Karl Rove (!!) would leak a story to damage a political opponent. Oh, 
the horror. And Karl has always been such a sweet guy. Just to give you 
an idea, one time Rove was displeased with the job done by a political 
advance man and said, "We will f--- him. Do you hear me? We will f--- 
him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever f---ed him!" (From an 
article by Ron Suskind). And that was a guy who was on his side.

      Attacking an opponent's wife is standard operating procedure for 
Rove. Have Republicans actually convinced themselves that he wouldn't 
do such a thing? People, sometimes party loyalty asks too much.

      Actually, we are missing the point here. The point being that 
Joseph Wilson is merely one of the many people who provided one of the 
by now innumerable pieces of evidence that this administration lied 
about why we went to war in Iraq. When former Treasury Secretary Paul 
O'Neill wrote that Bush planned to invade Iraq from the day he took 
office, the administration went after O'Neill. When Richard Clarke 
disclosed that the Bushies wanted to use Sept. 11 to go after Saddam 
Hussein from Sept. 12 on, they went after Clarke. They went after Gen. 
Zinni, they went after Gen. Shinseki and everyone else who opposed the 
folly or told the truth about it. After they got done lying about 
weapons of mass destruction and about connections to Al Qaeda, they 
switched to the stomach-churning pretense that we had done it all for 
democracy. Urp.

      We suffer the worst attack on this country since Pearl Harbor, and 
the Bush administration sends the FBI after the American Civil 
Liberties Union. The ACLU exists to protect every citizen's rights as 
defined in the Bill of Rights in the Constitution of the United States. 
The ACLU works solely through the legal system: It does not advocate 
violence, terrorism or any other damn thing except the Bill of Rights. 
Since when is that extremist? Why in the name of heaven are we wasting 
the FBI's time on this idiocy? I don't pretend to be an expert on 
counter-terrorism, but if it were up to me, I wouldn't start looking 
for the violence-prone in pacifist groups either. Your pacifists, you 
see -- oh, just look it up.

      I know that sludge-for-brains like Bill O'Reilly attack the ACLU 
for being "un-American," but when Bill O'Reilly's constitutional rights 
are violated, the ACLU will stand up for him just like they did for 
Oliver North, Communists, the KKK, atheists, movement conservatives and 
everyone else they've defended over the years. The premise is easily 
understood: If the government can take away one person's rights, it can 
take away everyone's.

      We are living in a time when our government is investigating an 
organization that stands for the highest and best American ideals. And 
claiming the mantle of patriotism while they are about it. This is 
cuckoo -- and such an idiotic waste of the FBI's time and the 
taxpayers' money that whoever thought up this idiocy should be fired 
yesterday.

      But even that is superseded by what lies at the heart of Plamegate 
and that is lying in order to get this country into war. If the 
Washington press corps had a memory bank longer than 10 minutes, they 
could have exposed this years ago: the lies so often directly 
contradict one another. Before the war, the CIA was such a wussy 
organization it kept trying to downplay weapons of mass destruction in 
Iraq: After the war, it was all the CIA's fault, they had exaggerated 
the weapons of mass destruction. And so on and so on.

      The trouble with piling lies on top of lies is that we can't even 
agree on facts anymore. I read the right-wing commentators, and it's 
not that we're not on the same page -- we're not even in the same 
library. They read the Downing Street memos and convince themselves 
they don't mean what they say. I really don't understand: Is it that 
hard to admit you're wrong when you're wrong? Is it that hard to admit 
that the invasion of Iraq has been a disaster? Isn't it self-evident?

      If you support someone politically, you are not required to 
believe they are perfect. Did I think Bill Clinton had a sleazy affair 
while he was president? Yes. I just didn't care. I didn't think it had 
anything to do with the way he was running the country. You can't 
dismiss this. You can't not care about lies and war. Not if you care 
about American soldiers.
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