Bush War Lies #13

Someone recently asked me if this "Bush War Lies" series will ever end. I told him it would end when Bush stops lying.

The most recent, and by far most outlandish and desperate, of the administrations lies came today, when House Speaker Dennis Hastert reached the absolute bottom of the barrel. He said, and I am not making this up, that if the intelligence George Bush got was bad, it was all ... wait for it ... Clinton's fault.

Yes. Clinton's fault. You read that right.

Okay folks, it is long past time the American Psychiatric Association classified obsessive hatred of ex-Presidents as a bona-fide mental disorder. I did not like or support Nixon, Ford, Reagan or Bush Senior, and indeed I hated several of the things they did while in office -- but if I ran into them in the street I certainly wouldn't pelt them with rocks and garbage. It would be an honour to meet them (actually, I met President Ford at a speech in Atlanta in '76, but that's beside the point).

Hastert, whose doughy, pudgy frame would not lead you to believe he could reach this far, claimed that Clinton was the one who "decimated" the human intelligence-gathering ability of the US years ago because of his ... get ready for this ... "proclivity not to use human rights violators and other shady individuals as intelligence operatives."

If it weren't so sad, it would be funny. You mean, Speaker Hastert, like well-known Bush CIA operative Manuel Noriega? You mean like CIA operative the Shah of Iran? You mean like ... CIA operative Saddam Hussein? Those sorts of shady characters?

Actually, quotes like this kind of make me happy, because when people utter complete crap like this, it means they are backed up against the wall and they know it, and they're spitting like kittens in a corner.

On the same Sunday morning gab fest, incidentally, our own Senator Bob Graham finally grew some balls and admitted what he'd been hinting at for weeks: the guy who pushed for the Niger lie to be inserted into the State of the Union speech was ... ta da! ... Dick Cheney, the guy who wanted claim to Iraq's oilfields years ago, and that he was well aware months before the speech that the information was false. Indeed, it was he who sent an ambassador to Niger to investigate the claim a year before the speech, and that ambassador's report was unequivocal: the documents were forged, the story was a hoax. And Cheney knew this 11 months before Bush said it.

So, at best, they are liars; at worst, they are incompetent idiots. Take your pick.