Mr. Bush, Meet Mr. Taft

Prospect: Some Ammo For Those Who Think Dissent = Loyalty

(The American Prospect)  This column was written by Michael Tomasky.

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Watching and reading George W. Bush's Veterans' Day speech last Friday confirmed my belief that it's a good thing Karl Rove wasn't indicted. If this is the best these people can do, Rove is doing Bush a lot more damage from his White House office than he would as an indictee.

The speech was humiliating to Bush and the United States of America on so many levels that I don't even know where to begin. OK, actually, I do. I'll begin with the outright lie.

My critics, Bush whimpered, "are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs."

No such thing ever happened. That bipartisan investigation — the so-called "Phase II" probe into administration manipulation of pre-war intelligence — is ongoing right now. It's taken this long to start because, as Laura Rozen reported in our October print issue, Senate intelligence committee chairman Pat Roberts dragged his feet; and, as Murray Waas reported in The National Journal online, once Roberts did haltingly begin the probe, Dick Cheney and his staff refused to turn over crucial documentation. The delays and stonewalls, of course, are exactly what led the Democrats to call the closed session of the Senate. The probe is finally proceeding — but it sure hasn't "found" anything.

There is no other way to interpret Bush's sentence: It is a direct, unmediated, Nixonian lie. What kind of pathetic man would utter such a lie on Veterans' Day, when over 2,000 U.S. soldiers have died?

But what may be even more embarrassing is the old dissent-is-disloyalty saw: "These baseless attacks," Bush said, "send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will." In other words, criticizing my case for the war is giving comfort to the enemy.

Comfort to the enemy. Interesting phrase. It's been used before — by a Republican; in fact, by "Mr. Republican," Robert A. Taft, who was speaking against the Roosevelt administration.

I wrote this up for Salon in 2002. But back then, before the Iraq War had even started and long before Democrats started growing a spine, no one paid attention. I'm not in the habit of recycling my hits, but this one is worth reintroducing — not for what I wrote, but for the material I quoted.