Rove Does What He Does Best: To Explain Away One Lie, Comes Up w/ Another ('Distract-And-Conflate')

[Hissyspit]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-fiderer/karl-roves-perversions-of_b_486252.html

Karl Rove's Perversions of History, And His Media Enablers

David Fiderer
Banker/Writer
Posted: March 4, 2010 04:00 PM

In his new memoir, Karl Rove does what he does best. To explain away one lie, he comes up with another. He claims that Bush probably would not have invaded Iraq had he known there were no weapons of mass destruction there. Bush knew perfectly well that our WMD intelligence had been fully discredited. So did everyone else. Anyone who says otherwise is lying. It's a lie that Bush and his apologists have been repeating for almost seven years.

For the umpteenth time, on March 7, 2003 the U.N. inspectors reported that there was zero evidence that Iraq had ever made any attempt to develop a nuclear weapon after the Persian Gulf War. Those findings were later affirmed by Bush's own Iraq Survey Group, which said "Iraq did not possess a nuclear device, nor had it tried to reconstitute a capability to produce nuclear weapons after 1991."

As for other types of WMD, Hans Blix also found zero evidence of weapons of mass destruction, aside from a small number of empty chemical munitions, which should have been declared and destroyed. Blix also explained why the evidence previously presented by Colin Powell was bogus. On March 7, 2003, Blix said his team needed a few more weeks to complete their work. Germany, France and others went on the record, stating, "While suspicions remain, no evidence has been given that Iraq still possesses weapons of mass destruction or capabilities in this field."

To mask the dishonesty surrounding the invasion, Rove and others have invoked a standard right-wing ploy, which I'll call "distract-and-conflate." Distract the public with some irrelevant bit of trivia, and then conflate that trivia into the broader narrative designed to confuse the public about who bears the blame. The distraction is usually planted by a friendly media source, and then amplified by others, who seem to be analytically challenged.

A classic case was the quote, "It's a slam dunk," by CIA Director George Tenet, who was never interviewed by Bob Woodward for his book, The Path to War. Whatever Tenet meant at that December 21, 2002 meeting, his point was completely irrelevant by March 2003, when the latest comprehensive on-the-ground intelligence, from a multinational inspection force, had proved Tenet wrong. Neither Bush nor his people ever attempted to reconcile the findings of the U.N. inspectors with their own. Nor did they ever identify any flaws in the inspectors' work product. Nor were they open to allowing the U.N. inspectors to continue to complete their efforts to achieve definitive report. Nor were they willing to give other members of the U.N. Security Council time to evaluate both sides.

To conflate George Tenet's four-word sound bite, or the more generalized "we-relied-on-faulty-intelligence" excuse, with Bush's decision to invade Iraq, one must engage in a kind of time warp. One must to perpetuate the fiction the U.N. inspectors did not put everyone one notice. This conflation is a shameful perversion of history. Anyone who tacitly or explicitly promotes the lie that Bush invaded in good faith is himself being dishonest.

Rove's other distract-and-conflate ploy relates to the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson.

- snip -

The White House never rebutted Wilson's charges. Quite the opposite...

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[Solly Mack]

1. k/r

[MisterP]

2. like when people say that Ollie North or Dubya were so bad--that they were like "the Communists" nt

[Kingofalldems]

3. Kick this for Rove's pal