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Karl Rove was George W. Bush's closest aide throughout Bush's political career. There is a book about him entitled Bush's Brain. The book makes the case that anything that resembled a thought that Geo W. had was actually a thought grabbed from Rove's thought bubble and glued into Bush's thought bubble.
Rove has written a book that highlights (some would say
lowlights is more appropriate) Rove's life and career and his time working for Bush. After a career of lying for Bush, Rove's book piles on more lies — in an attempt to shore up the previous lies.
Some examples:
- Lie: Rove admits that the U.S. wouldn't have gone to war with Iraq if the administration knew that weapons of mass destruction wouldn't be found.
Truth: the U.S. wouldn't have gone to war with Iraq if Congress and the American public knew that weapons of mass destruction didn't exist.
- Lie:The Bush administration itself would probably have sought other ways to constrain Saddam, bring about regime change, and deal with Iraq's horrendous human rights violations."
Truth: If Bush actually cared about "human rights violations," Iraq would not have been the first country to invade. Most certainly China and Myanmar (Burma) would have been higher on the list, as would several other countries. If Bush actually cared about "human rights violations," he would have invaded Guantanamo and taken prisoner our own CIA and Marines.
- Partly truth, mostly fiction: Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, Rove argued, may have destroyed most of his WMD stockpiles or possibly moved them to other countries such as Syria before the war.
Partial Truth: Saddam destroyed (under the auspices of UN inspectors) his WMDs. He did so prior to Bush stealing the 2000 election. Bush (meaning Rove) sent 3 different teams of inspectors to look for WMDs. Saddam allowed the inspectors to comb over Iraq. They found nothing that conflicted with the reports from 6 previous years of inspections. When a team didn't give Bush (meaning Rove) the answers he wanted, he fired them and sent in a new team.
- Mostly fiction: (the claim that) Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein moved his WMDs to other countries such as Syria before the war.
Truth: One word: Mossad (Israel's spy agency). If Saddam had WMDs, Mossad knew everything there was to know about them - including where he would have moved them. Besides, Syria would not have allowed it; two words: (1)Israel, (2)USA. Syria knew the price they would pay if they accepted Saddam's alleged WMDs. In case anyone missed it:
- Israel will not allow an Arab nation (including Syria) to have WMDs.
- Israel has kicked the asses of every Arab nation (including Syria).
- Syria has been trying for decades to negotiate with Israel to regain the Golan Heights that Israel seized from Syria in 1967.
- Israel already destroyed Saddam's only nuclear threat.
- The USA did not look kindly upon Afghanistan's harboring of Al Qaeda. You might say that we invaded the country in response to that cooperation with terrorists. You might also say that it won't happen again.
- No Arab country trusted Saddam or wanted to have anything to do with Saddam - he was a secularist and a loose cannon.
- Why is it that nearly everyone who opposed the war had facts proving that there were no WMDs? Why is it that inspection teams — impartial, like the UN inspectors, and partisan, like Bush's (Rove's) hand-picked "inspectors" never found anything? Why is it that people who wanted to go to war believed the Liar-In-Chief (Rove) in spite of all facts to disprove the WMD claims and no facts to prove the claims?
- Lie: "Our weak response in defense of the president and in setting the record straight (about WMDs), is, I believe, one of the biggest mistakes of the Bush years."
Truth: The biggest mistakes were
- Lying to start a war.
- Lying about the real reasons for the war.
- Torturing captives.
- Lying abut torturing captives.
- Hiring officials based on party loyalty rather than on actual qualifications: "Heckuva job, Brownie."
- Running the country for the benefit of Republicans, rather than for the benefit of the American people. Someone turned loose the Crawford Hillbillies, and they stole everything that wasn't nailed down - and carried big pry bars to get the rest. Two words: "Jack Abramoff"
- Lie: He defends the use of enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs), arguing they were authorized by the Department of Justice in August 2002 and signed off by then-CIA director George Tenet.
He also disputes claims that the administration failed to brief members of Congress on the use of these techniques. Democratic leaders had been briefed about them. Their silence made them complicit in their use," he wrote. "Nonetheless, when political winds shifted and memories of 9/11 faded, some Democratic leaders claimed that they had never been told about the techniques and that the Bush administration used EITs only in secret."
Truth: OK, this is a he-said-she-said situation. Note two salient facts:
- Democrats invited to the "briefings" were not allowed to take notes or otherwise record the proceedings, so there is no proof of what really happened
- Which side has the track record for lying about everything connected to this war & its collateral damage?
He singled out House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, who charged in July 2009 that the CIA misled Congress in a secret briefing she received in 2002. Pelosi said the CIA failed to inform her and others at the briefing about harsh interrogation techniques being used on terrorism suspects.
The CIA (at the direction of Cheney-Rove-Bush) responded by saying Pelosi was told about the harsh techniques, including waterboarding, at the classified 2002 briefing.
- Lie: Rove says the president "never authorized torture," but rather "did just the opposite" by making sure the techniques "did not cross the legal line into torture."
Truth: Bush (meaning Rove)ordering the a partisan-packed Justice Department to create legal opinions that would justify torture. He did not ask an impartial or bipartisan commission to look into the legality of torture.
- Lie:"What's more, EITs did help our intelligence agents gather critical information to thwart future attacks," he added.
Truth: the Bushies (Rovies) have never proven a case in which torture actually generated actual, real, usable intelligence. Nor have they proven which "future attacks" were thwarted. Note that evidence proving torture (that the Rovies say didn't existed) got misplaced or accidentally destroyed. On the other hand, now that it is safe to come forward with information (not that Rove is out of power), many interrogators have done just that: they have provided examples of torture, examples of bad information gained from tortured prisoners, and examples of good information gained when torture was not used.
- [Note: Rove (Bush) and his administration have been criticized for their response to Hurricane Katrina, which devastated much of the Gulf Coast in 2005. One incident Rove addresses in the book involves Bush flying over Louisiana in Air Force One rather than landing and surveying the damage.] Rove notes that while the decision did not help out Bush politically, it was the right thing to do so as not to take away vital resources that were needed for the relief effort.]
Lie: Someone cared cared whether or not Bush's (Rove's) airplane landed in Naw-lins.
Truth: The real issue is not if Bush looked at the destruction. The real issue was that the Rove Administration took 3 days to acknowledge that something was wrong and to start taking action. Another real issue is that political hacks were in charge of a gutted, underfunded operation (FEMA). Another issue is that Rove (Bush) predictably focused on a little bit of looting rather than a massive amount of destruction and misery. Also predictable was that Bush (Rove) sent in armed mercenaries (Blackwater) to deal with the small problem (looting), and bungled the big picture (everything else - food, water, shelter, sanitation, missing persons).
- Lie: Rove cites a particularly touchy subject that emerged during the 2000 presidential campaign: Bush's 1976 arrest for driving while under the influence of alcohol. Rove said that while Bush told a few people about it, including himself, the governor didn't want it to be made public. The DUI disclosure, which came out shortly before Election Day, was "suspicious," Rove says.
He points a finger at Vice President Al Gore's campaign spokesman, Chris Lehane, as a possible source of the information getting out. "We had our suspicions and they centered on Lehane," Rove writes. "He had been raised in Kennebunk, was one of the Democratic Party's best opposition researchers, had run the Maine campaign for Clinton-Gore, worked on the White House rapid-response team handling scandals during the Clinton years, played around in Maine Democratic politics.
- Truth: Rove tries to distract attention from the actual issue: what was GW's driving record in Maine AND in Texas?
'Splain me this:
- Why, in his first week in office as Governor of Texas, did the Texas agency that managed drivers' licenses issue Bush a new license (one with no driving record attached)?
- Why does the source of the "leak" matter?
- Is the information true, or isn't it? That's what matters.
- Lie: Dick Cheney, a Defense Secretary under President George H.W. Bush and former Wyoming congressman, was tasked to help then-candidate Bush picking a running mate. But it would be Cheney's name that would resonate with Bush at the time. Rove says the governor was "starting to feel that Cheney was as good as any" [ ?!?! ] to fill the role. "I saw the man squirm as Bush pressed him to accept."
Truth: Bush asked Cheney to find a good running mate for the 2000 election. Cheney picked himself. [duh!]
- Lie (OK, insignificantly possibly true):Rove writes that he faced a possible indictment [true] over leaking CIA operative Valerie Plame's name to the media -- an accusation he denies in the book. Upon finding out that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was not likely to charge him, he says he "placed the receiver in its cradle and wept."
Truth: Who cares if Rove wept when he found out he wouldn't be going to jail? The fact is that Cheney and Skippy (or Scooter or something like that) Libby had to discredit Joe Wilson. reason: Cheney asked the CIA to prove that Saddam Hussien tried to purchase nuclear materials. The CIA sent Joe Wilson — former Ambassador to Iraq — to investigate the claim. Wilson returned and reported to the CIA that the claim was false ... not that there was no proof to support the claim, but that the claim was false. The CIA forwarded the non-classified information to Cheney. The Bush (Rove) administration ignored the report and continued to use the debunked claim to prove that Saddam was trying to make nuclear weapons. So Joe Wilson went public. In the New York Times he described the entire situation to the public, attempting to derail the use of false information. Cheney's response was to get some conservative "reporters" to identify Joe Wilson's wife as a CIA agent (which she was). She was a covert agent working, ironically, nuclear non-proliferation. If Bush's father, former CIA Director and form Commander-in-Chief is to be believed, the actions by Rove, Skippy, and their right-wing writers constitute TREASON. After months of pressure, Bush (Rove) relented and appointed a REPUBLICAN to be a Special Prosecutor to investigate the situation. The REPUBLICAN operative turned out to have more integrity than Bush-Rove-Cheney imagined. Granted, to those 3, integrity is a foreign concept, but still .... As the prosecutor closed in on Dick and Scooter, Scooter went into high gear to obstruct the investigation. Eventually Scooter-Skippy was convicted on 5 felonies involving obstruction of justice. The prosecutor gave up on investigating the Bush-Rove-Cheney triumvirate. And Bush commuted Libby's sentences in the conviction (on 5 felonies involving TREASON).
There's something truly ironic in Bush's nickname for his pal. Bush called Rove
Turdblossom. A turdblossom is a flower that grows up, wild and uncultivated, from a seed embedded in a bovine, um .... turd. Turdblossoms are always found next to
Post Turtles.
When you're driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, you are looking at a post turtle. You know that
- he didn't get there by himself
- he doesn't belong there
- he can't get anything done while he's up there
and you just want to help the poor thing get down before he hurts himself.
"Post Turtle" image and text first posted at our ancestor site Entropy Pile on August 17, 2006
posted by Recovering Republican® © ™ #
12:24 AM