Hey kids, want
to be first on your block to chant the GOP party line? Don't sit waiting
for the local newspaper to arrive, read
the Republican National Committee's "Weekly Team
Leader," peruse GOPUSA.com, or check out
the Weekly Standard. It doesn't matter which
options you choose, because they all say
the same things. Over and over and over.
From the standpoint
of Democrats, the most impressive aspect of the Republican spin and
smear machine, perfected during the Clinton
years, is its unanimity. Liberal pundits simply aren't
as gifted at groupthink. They're too busy
bickering and riding their individual hobbyhorses for
the kind of coordinated effort favored
by the GOP.
Conservative culture
warriors conduct political debate like a corporate ad campaign.
They're always on-message: same targets,
same smarmy techniques. It's political journalism,
Enron style. (They're also better paid.
Democrats, alas, have no wacky tycoons to match
Rev. Moon, Rupert Murdoch and Richard Mellon-Scaife.)
Especially during
wartime, political propaganda descends to the pro-wrestling level.
They didn't think so under Bill Clinton,
but because our glorious leader symbolizes the nation,
questioning President Junior's sublime
wisdom has become ipso facto anti-American. Like the
sheep in Orwell's Animal Farm, true believers
make up the majority of every strongman's
chanting mob--from Julius Caesar to Saddam
Hussein.
That doesn't make
Bush a dictator. But right-wing pundits like Weekly Standard editor
William Kristol and Fox News's Bill O'Reilly
aren't stupid. They know exactly what they're
doing when they argue that Iraq war opponents
hate Bush, and therefore hate America.
"[T]he real agenda of conservative media's
overbearing pundits," editorializes Salon "is to
drive everyone who disagrees with them
out of the public arena. They're not interested in
open debate; their goal is to intimidate
and silence."
Mostly, they don't
want anybody paying attention to stories like last week's admission
to ABC News by Bush administration "senior
officials" that they exaggerated the threat from
Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction"
to sell the public on a war whose real purpose was
to "flex muscle" in the Middle East. "We
were not lying," said one official. "But it was just a
matter of emphasis."
I've always assumed
that Saddam had chemical weapons left over from his days as a U.S.
client, when the Pentagon helped him target
Iranian troops. Having researched the subject when
the Reagan administration proposed manufacturing
nerve gas at the Pine Bluff Arsenal, I figured
Saddam wouldn't risk annihilation by using
it against a nuclear-armed foe. It's also too bulky and
too easily detected to export for terrorism;
a deadly anachronism useful only for genocide.
Both Bush and Colin
Powell, however, presented detailed lists of forbidden Iraqi arms.
They claimed that Saddam was hiding tons
of VX, and thousands of artillery shells and missiles.
They said he had 18 mobile bio-war labs,
and huge stores of anthrax. They hinted that U.N.
weapons inspectors were incompetent or
worse. Bush told the American people that not to
strike Iraq first would be "suicide." But
U.S. officials still haven't found Iraqi weapons either.
Now they hint they were mainly blowing
smoke.
So who do Democrat-Gazette
editors, following upon a wildly inaccurate report on the
GOPUSA website, think we should be angry
with? Why Bill Clinton, of course, who, we're told,
delivered an "anti-war rant" and made "Saddam
Hussein out to be just your ordinary reasonable
dictator" in New York on April 15. Through
the dark art of selective quotation, the editorial
ignored Clinton's explicit praise for Bush's
handling of the war. "Saddam's gone," Clinton said
"and good riddance."
The outcome of
the war, Clinton added, was never in doubt. "I would like to say something
nice,"
he said. "I think the President and Secretary
Rumsfeld and our military really did the right thing in
taking another week to ten days to conclude
this because they were able to save thousands and
thousands of civilian lives and if we're
going to, in effect, occupy Iraq we want to do [it] with the
least cost of lives on both sides."
Even if no weapons
of mass destruction are found, Clinton added "I don't think you can criticize
the President for trying to act on the
belief that they had a substantial amount of chemical and
biological stocks, because that's what
the British military intelligence said....That's what I was
always told, and I can just tell you that
if you're sitting there in the Oval Office, it is just
irresponsible to say, 'I've just got a
feeling you're all wrong.'"
So what drew conservative
ire? Clinton still thinks the U.N. Security Council could have been
brought around, and expressed hope Bush
would be magnanimous toward reluctant allies, whose
help we're going to need down the road.
In the Manichean world of conservative punditry, that all
but makes him a traitor.