While the liberal bloggosphere's been sleeping and resting on its laurels, the GOP has been engaged in a full-blown, campaign-like assault on the truth about Iraq intelligence and those missing WMDs. We haven't noticed it until now because the lies were so obvious, and so easy to debunk.
Well, now the hammer is coming down. Here's the GOP's latest ad. It has clips of President Clinton and other Democratic leaders, in 1998, 2002 and 2003, repeating the very same lies that George Bush repeated in his Veteran's Day speech.
Folks, this is trouble. This has the potential to derail our whole frame. We need to do something about this now.
This ad frames the discussion in a way that squares nicely with the whole GOP flip-flop and no ideas memes. As a campaign ad, it's as slimy and devastating as Willie Horton. What people will see is quotes taken out of context; the conclusion that they'll draw is that the Democrats were basically on board with the GOP until just recently. Never mind that the 2002 and 2003 lies were based on the same faulty intelligence and dirty tricks for which the White House is currently under investigation. Never mind that 1998 was a completely different situation from 2002.
What infuriates me about this is that we could have prevented this if our leadership had some more spine. The Democrats had a chance to say, "We voted for this war because we were lied to." A few did, but most didn't because they didn't want to look weak. Now they've painted themselves into a corner.
Our response has to be to undercut this ad as fast as we can. We have to get the message out there that 1998 and 2002 were different and that 2002 was based on lies. And we need to put this into the mainstream media cycle RIGHT NOW.
Addendum: I've done a little bit of analysis into how we can counter-spin this. Here's what I've got:
- The Democrats' statements from 2002 and 2003 were based on the same faulty intelligence and dirty tricks for which the White House is currently under investigation. They are the very product of the White House's lies about Iraq that are now the subject of this discussion. It is, in other words, a purely circular argument on their part.
- Clinton's statements from 1998 were admittedly based on incomplete information, since the inspectors had no access to the facilities that we believed contained those WMDs. That was, after all, what Operation Desert Fox was all about. However, 2002 and 2003 is a completely different story. We had inspectors on the ground who had access to all Iraqi facilities, and they reported that Iraq had no WMDs. The White House and the GOP spin machine responded by smearing Blix and the rest of the inspectors. We had 18,000 pages of documentation from the Iraqi government that they had destroyed their WMDs. The White House responded by ignoring the documentation. The White House and the whole world was hearing the truth, and the White House actively suppressed it.
Comments?