Rewriting History

Frankly, I'm just not sure what to say anymore after watching the Senate Democrats embarrass themselves yesterday. I've already written a lengthy post back in the days of my obscurity debunking the nonsensical "Bush lied" meme. Suffice it to say, many of the same Democrats who now claim to have never heard of Saddam Hussein were adamant that something be done about the threat of Iraq's WMD while George W. Bush was still Governor of Texas. Glenn Reynolds, the fabled Instapundit, has a great post making precisely this point at MSNBC.com:

The anti-war fundraising base of the Democrats -- as exemplified by organizations like MoveOn.org -- is powerful enough to require Democratic politicians like Harry Reid to pretend that all the WMD stuff began with President Bush. That is, not to put too fine a point on it, a gross and partisan lie.


As Robert Kagan noted in a terrific op-ed in the October 25 Washington Post, the media regularly ran stories from 1998-2000 on Saddam's WMD threat:

This was the consensus before Bush took office, before Scooter Libby assumed his post and before Judith Miller did most of the reporting for which she is now, uniquely, criticized. It was based on reporting by a large of number of journalists who in turn based their stories on the judgments of international intelligence analysts, Clinton officials and weapons inspectors. As we wage what the Times now calls "the continuing battle over the Bush administration's justification for the war in Iraq," we will have to grapple with the stubborn fact that the underlying rationale for the war was already in place when this administration arrived.


Concern about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was widely held and bipartisan years before George W. Bush became President. Investigating the overestimation of Iraq's WMD capability is one thing. But for the Democrats to now try to rewrite history is a shameful display of partisanship, and further proof of their utter lack of seriousness on issues of national security.