Lies and Scapegoats

Participation in politics by moral people is very difficult at best because political free speech enables deceit for any adversaries not so morally bound.

Recently Syrian claims to possess chemical weapons uncovered a long-standing lie. Liberal pundits denounced the Bush administration for not producing evidence of the weapons of mass destruction that was the basis of starting the Iraq war. Counter claims that Saddam Hussein had tricked us by sending his stockpile of such weapons to Syria just prior to the war passed silently in the liberal media because it was not convenient to their campaign against an administration not suitable to their ideology. They did this in spite of the fact that they knew there was an extensive and well-protected convoy out of Iraq to Syria during the claimed time frame of the export of WMD. Consider the testimony cited in the International Herald Tribune a subsidiary of the New York Times:¹

James Clapper, the director of U.S. National Intelligence and formerly the director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, in 2003 cited satellite imagery suggesting materials had been moved out of Iraq in the months before the war.

Other more or less credible claims have followed, from international inspectors to Saddam-era dissidents.

My own evidence, for what it is worth, is purely anecdotal. As I drove east from Damascus in mid-March 2003 to cross the border into Iraq, my Iraqi Kurdish companion said he had spoken to Kurdish truck drivers who regularly used the road.

They reported an unusual build-up of traffic out of Iraq in previous days. Closed convoys of unmarked trucks, which other drivers were forbidden from approaching or overtaking, had been streaming across the border into Syria.

Then when the Bush administration admitted to allowing the CIA to use the advanced interrogation technique of water-boarding they were being transparent about a policy that a more secular administration would have done secretly and then disclaimed. Yet they were penalized by the liberal system for honesty they would not have held themselves. How unfair.

As for the economy, no one could have stopped corporations from outsourcing in a democracy, neither Bush, nor the Republicans nor those who criticized them. If the Democrats were concerned about the economy after 2006, they did not show it. How much of the time before they could install a complicit president did they spend out of session? What bills they did pass were of the sort that would not encourage corporate reinvestment in our economy. Then too, a president up against a adversarial Congress often has to compromise to get anything he wants in return. In order to hold some ground on the issues most important to him, Bush had to allow this adversarial Congress some of the things they wanted. In this context, Bush mistakenly allowed the Democrats to pass a bill on July 30, 2008 promoting subprime housing loans to those who could not afford them under the deceptive title of the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008.²

The timing of the economic crisis did not really begin to move until it was clear that Barack Hussein Obama was clearly the Democratic nominee. Indeed, all was quiet economically in August 2008 when the Democratic convention was held. If Democratic policy since 2006 was hostile to money interests already, a nominee set up by the system to win was now going to redistribute their wealth. Now on the lam looking for a way to protect their assets, their minds were not on the operation of their businesses. AIG in particular never appeared to have their minds on their business and their later investment of public bailout money in Europe shows where they were looking for sympathy. A precarious economy now had no real guidance or oversight. No wonder that a housing bubble created by the Democrats to give risky loans to a poor who could not pay them back then burst. The rest is history.

The beginning of these tragedies is not the end of them. In spite of Obama's declared intent to create jobs, his and his party's policies have worked against them. For example, Intel said in 2009 that they wanted to bring back jobs to America. Yet because of a political environment hostile to business interests, they put it off. Now instead, they have made a big investment in Asia. Another is that the EPA shutdown 200 coal-fired power plants contrary to a declared policy of energy independence. This is an EPA that declared under rule of an Obama appointee an intent to crucify offending corporations:

A top official at the Environmental Protection Agency has apologized after being captured on video saying his agency's method of enforcing oil and gas regulations was to find a few bad actors to "crucify" and hold up as examples.³

This kind of policy is killing jobs, not creating them. Then when I see ads on television and the internet advertising subprime loans they claim Obama enabled them through the law, I have to wonder. How can the Democrats lay on Bush that which they currently advocate, especially since their current advocacy shows ownership of the fated bill passed in July 2008. Will America survive the rule of these radical overlords?

The truth is not convenient however, and still Bush is made the quiet scapegoat for all these things. Why don't he speak up?

I was interrupted repeated by hacking for a time when I first started writing this article on November 2. Jackboots!

¹Harvey Morris, "The Unresolved Mystery of Syria’s ‘Iraqi’ Chemical Weapons," International Herald Tribune, July 24, 2012, link, archive.
²"The Financial Crisis: A Timeline of Events and Policy Actions." Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. link.
³Ben Wolfgang, "EPA official apologizes for ‘crucify’ comments," The Washington Times, April 26, 2012, link to similar article, archive.

Document History
November 2, 2012 Created.
November 3, 2012 Added links to footnoted references.