predictions: our next president?

[Lord Jim]

[Gob]

Bush's lies have cost more than 1 trillion dollars and created ISIS.

Oh well, he's in good company..

In the 13 years since 9/11, those false flag narratives have been refuted ad nauseam, their proponents exposed and debunked. Yet now the conspiracy theories are at it again, suggesting another Islamist group is benefiting from underhand U.S. support.

The theorists claim that, despite Barack Obama's campaign to wipe out Isis (known as Islamic State), the militant army is in fact a creation of the American government.

It seems the theory's most vociferous and dedicated supporters are in Iran. A recent article in the New York Times sought the views of a broad cross-section of Iranian society, and found many people were convinced IS was conceived by the Washington power-brokers in their quest to destroy Tehran.

The paper quoted an Iranian supermarket owner as saying: "Come on, you know who has created Isis." Meanwhile a radiologist opined that "America supports any group that breaks a ring of this Iran-Syria-Lebanon-Palestine chain."

Historian Housang Tale proferred a similar view, saying: "Without groups like IS we can revive our empire and become the biggest power in the region."

The report followed a story by the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), which cited a supposed interview with National Security Agency (NSA) leaker Edward Snowden. During the interview, Snowden allegedly said the US, Britain and Israel created "a terrorist organisation capable of centralising all extremist actions across the world."

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has often publicly expressed his views on the relations between U.S. and IS.

In an address to the nation, Khamenei reminded Iranians that terror group al-Qaida was a creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), adding: "There is no doubt that these movements are created by Western powers and their regional agents."

[Lord Jim]

In the 13 years since 9/11, those false flag narratives...

Oh for the love of God, we've got to do something about those false flags...

The reason there is so much flooding going on in Texas, is to create an excuse to march Texans away to FEMA Concentration camps...

WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!!

[Econoline]

Worse than lies...

George W. Bush didn't just lie about the Iraq War.
What he did was much worse.

Paul Waldman
May 20, 2015

None of the conservatives running for president want to be associated with the last Republican president — not even his brother (for whom stepping away is rather complicated). After all, George W. Bush left office with an approval rating hovering in the low 30s, and his grandest project was the gigantic catastrophe of the Iraq War, which we're still dealing with and still debating. If you're a Republican right now you're no doubt wishing we could talk about something else, but failing that, you'd like the issue framed in a particular way: The war was an honest mistake, nobody lied to the public, and anything bad that's happening now is Barack Obama's fault.

For the moment I want to focus on the part about the lies. I've found over the years that conservatives who supported the war get particularly angry at the assertion that Bush lied us into war. No, they'll insist, it wasn't his fault: There was mistaken intelligence, he took that intelligence in good faith, and presented what he believed to be true at the time. It's the George Costanza defense: It's not a lie if you believe it.

Here's the problem, though. It might be possible, with some incredibly narrow definition of the word "lie," to say that Bush told only a few outright lies on Iraq. Most of what he said in order to sell the public on the war could be said to have some basis in something somebody thought or something somebody alleged (Bush was slightly more careful than Dick Cheney, who lied without hesitation or remorse). But if we reduce the question of Bush's guilt and responsibility to how many lies we can count, we miss the bigger picture.

What the Bush administration launched in 2002 and 2003 may have been the most comprehensive, sophisticated, and misleading campaign of government propaganda in American history. Spend too much time in the weeds, and you risk missing the hysterical tenor of the whole campaign.

That's not to say there aren't plenty of weeds. In 2008, the Center for Public Integrity completed a project in which they went over the public statements by eight top Bush administration officials on the topic of Iraq, and found that no fewer than 935 were false, including 260 statements by President Bush himself. But the theory on which the White House operated was that whether or not you could fool all of the people some of the time, you could certainly scare them out of their wits. That's what was truly diabolical about their campaign.

And it was a campaign. In the summer of 2002, the administration established something called the White House Iraq Group, through which Karl Rove and other communication strategists like Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin coordinated with policy officials to sell the public on the threat from Iraq in order to justify war. "The script had been finalized with great care over the summer," White House press secretary Scott McClellan later wrote, for a "campaign to convince Americans that war with Iraq was inevitable and necessary."

In that campaign, intelligence wasn't something to be understood and assessed by the administration in making their decisions, it was a propaganda tool to lead the public to the conclusion that the administration wanted. Again and again we saw a similar pattern: An allegation would bubble up from somewhere, some in the intelligence community would say that it could be true but others would say it was either speculation or outright baloney, but before you knew it the president or someone else was presenting it to the public as settled fact.

And each and every time the message was the same: If we didn't wage war, Iraq was going to attack the United States homeland with its enormous arsenal of ghastly weapons, and who knows how many Americans would perish. When you actually spell it out like that it sounds almost comical, but that was the Bush administration's assertion, repeated hundreds upon hundreds of time to a public still skittish in the wake of September 11. (Remember, the campaign for the war began less than a year after the September 11 attacks.)

Sometimes this message was imparted with specific false claims, sometimes with dark insinuation, and sometimes with speculation about the horrors to come ("We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," said Bush and others when asked about the thinness of much of their evidence). Yet the conclusion was always the same: The only alternative to invading Iraq was waiting around to be killed. I could pick out any of a thousand quotes, but here's just one, from a radio address Bush gave on September 28, 2002:

The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given. The regime has long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist groups, and there are al Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq. This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year.

What wasn't utterly false in that statement was disingenuous at best. But if there was anything that marked the campaign, it was its certainty. There was seldom any doubt expressed or admitted, seldom any hint that the information we had was incomplete, speculative, and the matter of fevered debate amongst intelligence officials. But that's what was going on beneath the administration's sales job.

The intelligence wasn't "mistaken," as the Bush administration's defenders would have us believe today. The intelligence was a mass of contradictions and differing interpretations. The administration picked out the parts that they wanted — supported, unsupported, plausible, absurd, it didn't matter — and used them in their campaign to turn up Americans' fear.

This is one of the many sins for which Bush and those who supported him ought to spend a lifetime atoning. He looked out at the American public and decided that the way to get what he wanted was to terrify them. If he could convince them that any day now their children would die a horrible death, that they and everything they knew would be turned to radioactive ash, and that the only chance of averting this fate was to say yes to him, then he could have his war. Lies were of no less value than truth, so long as they both created enough fear.

And it worked.

[Lord Jim]

[wesw]

rube and e-150 remind me of a Jethro tull song....


guesses?

[Guinevere]

Ahem, LJ, just because you say it over and over, doesn't mean its true.

[wesw]

living in the past...

[Sue U]

living in the past...

If you don't know how and why we gt where we are today, then you have no basis on which to make policies and plans for the future.

Also, they're still trying Nazis today.

[wesw]

no shit Sherlock. yeah just keep kicking bush for being dumb enough to listen to cheney and Rumsfeld about Iraq. news flash, everyone realizes he screwed up, we have learned the lesson.

(insert picture of a donkey, kicking a dead horse, here)

I really hope the GOP doesn t nominate jeb bush. Hillary will win if so....

[Lord Jim]

If you don't know how and why we gt where we are today, then you have no basis on which to make policies and plans for the future.

Absolutely...

Which is why we need to consider substantiated facts and avoid complete ass gas, which is all that's contained in that screed by Mr. Waldman...

If we embrace agenda driven fairy tales like the contents of that article, we'll never know how we got where are... We'll have a complete false reading of history...

I believe that this is the second bit of drivel from this propagandist who masquerades (not very convincingly) as a journalist, that has been posted here...

I strongly suggest that Mr. Waldman never speak near an open flame...

The methane that he emits would be sure to cause an explosion...

[BoSoxGal]

Ahem, LJ, just because you say it over and over, doesn't mean its true.

Actually, that's pretty much LJ's approach to 'reality' . . . at least in the few years I've been reading his posts.

[Econoline]

Iraq: The War Card from Center for Public Integrity:

Released in January 2008, this investigation sought to document every public statement made by eight top Bush administration officials from September 11, 2001, to September 11, 2003, regarding: Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction and Iraq's links to Al Qaeda.
Read the project overview | About the project

Search the database of 935 documented false statements by 8 Bush administration officials.

[wesw]

john Kasich is president, john Kasich is president. john Kasich is president.........

my daughter has begun to show and interest in politics and public affairs. watching news and such. she has been asking me who I want to be president next. I keep telling her I have not made up my mind yet, that I don t know until I get all the info I can. she is aware that I don t want Hillary, but I had not even indicated which party I wanted to win. get as much info as you can and make your own decision is my advice to her.

well last night I told her that I had chosen john Kasich as the guy I wanted to win. she said, "who"?......

then after I explained who he was, she asked me to explain how our tax system works.....

kids....

but she is pretty bright. when we watch MSNBC she is amazed at how silly and transparently full of crap that they are....

we came up with new words to fit their acronym MSNBC, More Stories, No Brain Cells....

[Lord Jim]

Actually, that's pretty much LJ's approach to 'reality' . . .

Hey, it's not my fault that people keep re-posting the same BS for me to refute over and over...take it up with them...

In the case of this "Bush made up reasons to go into Iraq, all the evidence said Saddam didn't have WMD" garbage that rube keeps reposting, I have brought so much proof to the contrary here (and going back to the CSB) over and over, that frankly I'm just tired of doing it....

At this point, only an extremely stupid person, a completely dishonest person, or one suffering from a very advanced case of Bush Derangement Syndrome (or some combination of the three) can continue to make that baseless claim...

So from now on every time he does it, I'm just going to point out that he's a liar and leave it at that...