Finally. Part one is here.
So, Karl Rove has been running around repeating his new favorite lie about how the Democrats forced the vote on waging war on Iraq like, as Steve Benen says, a jazz musician hitting the same wrong note again and again so that anyone paying attention in the audience might start to wonder if the wrong note wasn't in fact the right note.
That even other Bush Leaguers have called him on the lie won't stop him. Karl Rove is one of the world's most talented liars. That's his gift and like anyone with a gift he enjoys showing it off. He lies for sport, he lies for fun, he lies for political gain, he lies for the money it makes him, he lies for the sheer meanness of it.
And he knows that the elite journalists he deigns to talk to won't call him on his lies. They want him to lie to them. They love it that he lies. It's part of his charm, it's part of what makes him a winner, and they admire winners above all. They also like it that his lies help them with theirs. Accepting his lies makes it easier for them to pretend that the political landscape is as they want it to be, a playground without meaning or consequence where Democrats are hypocritical spoilsports who ruin everybody's fun with their facts and their insistence that politics matter and real people get helped or hurt by what the Insiders do.
Karl Rove prospers and thrives by lying. There's no percentage in it for him to do otherwise. But I can't help thinking that this time around there's a truth behind the lie.
Rove claims that the Bush Leaguers didn't want to vote on going to war in Iraq before the mid-term elections in 2002. And I believe that they didn't. And I believe that the Democrats forced them to push for the vote...in a way.
In the spring of 2002, the Democratic majority in the Senate was in a position to start investigating certain goings-on at the White House, including what had happened on 9/11. And in the spring of 2002 the Bush Administration was showing lots of signs that it needed to be investigated.
Not only did it need to be investigated, it was clear that it could be investigated without any political risk. The wheels were coming off the car.
As I said in Part One, George W. Bush was never a truly popular President. People, even people who'd voted for him, never really warmed up to him. The image of the regular guy we'd all like to have a beer with was a complete media fabrication, invented mainly to use as a weapon in the Beltway Insiders' War on Gore. Lots of independents and many Republicans remembered what he'd done to John McCain. No Democrats were going to forget how he "won" the Presidency. As soon as he came into office he started showing himself up as what he was, a petulant little man with no patience for the job, no real interest in it, who cared only about being President because it gave him certain bragging rights. Right away it was obvious the Dick Cheney was running the show and that Cheney saw the White House as a branch office for Haliburton, the oil companies, and Enron.
Enron.
On September 10, 2001, George W. Bush's name was pretty near impossible to say without following it up with Ken Lay's.
Then the planes struck, the buildings burned and fell.
Bush had his bullhorn moment and his Presidency started over.
Or seemed to. At least in the minds of the Beltway Media Insiders.
But as much as the wishful thinkers in Washington tried to turn him into Teddy Roosevelt or Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill or just a new and better, stronger, more mature and serious-minded George W. Bush, I doubt many Americans could wipe from their mind's eye the images of him sitting stupefied in that classroom and then running----away from the camera, his back towards us, he turned his back on the country and ran for cover. People were grateful when he finally climbed to the top of that pile of rubble, but they were also probably thinking, What took you so long to get here?
It's true, the country rallied round. But as columnist Christopher Caldwell warned his fellow conservatives, it wasn't Bush the man the People were rallying around, it was Bush the symbol. In cheering for President Bush we were cheering for America. When the Bush Leaguers made the mistake of thinking it was the man himself we were cheering, the cheering started to lose gusto.
Unless Karl Rove can prove he objected and it was done against his better judgment and will, the decision to use 9/11 for partisan political ends will top the list of evidence that Rove was never the political genius the Media continues to take him to be.
By spring of 2002, Enron was back in the news, joined by stories about Dick Cheney's shady dealings at Haliburton and George W. Bush's own dubious business arrangements with Harken Oil.
And then there was that memo.
It came out in May of 2002. The whole country learned that on August 6, 2001, the President was told that Osama bin-Laden was planning a terrorist attack on the United States, an attack that would involve airplanes, and the President...did nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing that would have prevented 9/11.
As I said, I don't think it was because he and Cheney and their crazy neo-con advisers wanted the attacks to happen. I think they just didn't care if they did, and they probably didn't care because they didn't believe anything would happen or at least not anything that couldn't be handled on the spot if and when it happened. They didn't worry about terrorists because terrorism was one of the things Bill Clinton worried about. The Administration always operated from the premise that whatever Clinton did Bush should do the opposite. If it mattered to Clinton, it didn't matter. If Clinton thought it, it was wrong. If Clinton did it one way, then the right way was to do it the opposite way.
Terrorism was Bill Clinton's thing, so the very first move the Bush Leaguers made on that front was to demote Richard Clarke and shift our intelligence and security priorities away from terrorist organizations, like al-Qaeda, and onto more traditional enemies...like Saddam Hussein.
This was stupider in hindsight than it might have appeared then, but even at the time it was plainly pretty damn stupid.
The memo's appearance proved that they'd not only been stupid, they'd been careless and incompetent, because even despite their own decision not to maintain a vigilant eye they'd still found out about an impending terrorist attack and done nothing about it.
When the fact of the memo hit the headlines Condoleeza Rice tried to excuse the administration's failure to act by claiming a failure of imagination. Nobody, she said, could have foreseen what al-Qaeda planned to do with those planes.
Besides this being a lie, there were intelligence reports warning about bin-Laden's wanting to use hijacked airplanes as missiles, this was just a dumb thing to say, because Rice was conceding that the Bush Leaguers knew about the hijacking plans and anyone who thought a little bit about that would quickly come to conclusions that weren't at all flattering to President Bush and his advisers.
First, even if "all" that al-Qaeda was going to do was hijack a couple of airplanes, wasn't that something to work hard to prevent? This wasn't going to be just some idiot wanting a free flight to Havana. This was a pack of blood-thirsty killers whose reason for being was to bring sudden and violent death to their enemies. Any hijacking by this band of thugs was bound to end with people dying. Why wouldn't the President have wanted to stop that?
Second, following from that thought, was this: Why would would anybody have had to know what the hijackers planned to do with the planes in order to stop them from hijacking the planes? If they couldn't take the planes to begin with, then they couldn't do whatever it was they planned to do with them, could they? And how much effort would it have needed to prevent the hijackings? Some beefed up security at the airports, air marshals placed aboard random flights coupled with a general announcement that they would be there?
One simple thing would have prevented everything: Ordering pilots to lock the cockpit doors before take-off and not unlock them until their planes were back on the ground, standard procedure, I believe, aboard all Israeli airliners.
Once people started thinking hard about what that memo meant, Congress might get into it. A serious investigation would turn up---as the 9/11 Commission did turn up---the fact that FBI agents were onto the terrorists who would hijack and fly those planes. That memo was just the beginning. If nothing was done to change the subject, it wouldn't be long before the People learned just how criminally negligent the Bush Leaguers had been, how inept, how careless, how stupid, how culpable in the deaths of 3000 Americans.
The subject had to be changed.
This is where my conspiracy theory begins again and where Part Two ends. Part Three: Iraq.
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