Tornado Alley (PROG)

[My Dime]

Yep, that's an elephant, all right

By Molly Ivins

Creators Syndicate


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.

The entire Republican Party is shocked (!) that anyone would think that Karl Rove (!!) would leak a story to damage a political opponent. Oh, the horror.

Have Republicans actually convinced themselves that he wouldn't do such a thing?

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 President 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 Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni; they went after Army Chief of Staff Eric 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 anything other than 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 counterterrorism, 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 O'Reilly's constitutional rights are violated, the ACLU will stand up for him just like it did for Oliver North, Communists, the KKK, atheists, movement conservatives and everyone else it has 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 it goes about it.

This is cuckoo -- and an idiotic waste of the FBI's time and the taxpayers' money.

But even that is superseded by what is at the heart of Plamegate: lying to get this country into war.

If the Washington press corps had a memory bank longer than 10 minutes, its members could have exposed this years ago -- the lies so often directly contradict one another. Before the war, the CIA was such a wussy organization that it kept trying to downplay weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. After the war, it was all the CIA's fault -- it 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 that 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.

http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/columnists/molly_ivins/12186230.htm