Missing the Big Picture…

So Molly Ivins wrote a brilliant editorial at freepress.org about how Americans seem to be missing the point with this whole Karl Rove thing. We’re focusing on who the leak was and whether or not it was a criminal act and losing site of the fact that it was done as political payback to a man who disagreed with President Bush’s so-called evidence of WMD in Iraq.

Actually, we are missing the point here. The point being that Joseph Wilson is merely one of the many people who provided one of the by now innumerable pieces of evidence that this administration lied about why we went to war in Iraq. When former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill wrote that Bush planned to invade Iraq from the day he took office, the administration went after O’Neill. When Richard Clarke disclosed that the Bushies wanted to use Sept. 11 to go after Saddam Hussein from Sept. 12 on, they went after Clarke. They went after Gen. Zinni, they went after Gen. Shinseki and everyone else who opposed the folly or told the truth about it. After they got done lying about weapons of mass destruction and about connections to Al Qaeda, they switched to the stomach-churning pretense that we had done it all for democracy. Urp.

She also talks about how the Bush administration has set the FBI on the ACLU:

The ACLU works solely through the legal system: It does not advocate violence, terrorism or any other damn thing except the Bill of Rights. Since when is that extremist? Why in the name of heaven are we wasting the FBI’s time on this idiocy? I don’t pretend to be an expert on counter-terrorism, but if it were up to me, I wouldn’t start looking for the violence-prone in pacifist groups either…

…We are living in a time when our government is investigating an organization that stands for the highest and best American ideals. And claiming the mantle of patriotism while they are about it. This is cuckoo — and such an idiotic waste of the FBI’s time and the taxpayers’ money that whoever thought up this idiocy should be fired yesterday.

And I love this line:

If you support someone politically, you are not required to believe they are perfect.

I wish all of those people who voted for Bush or even Kerry would take a moment and really think about that one. Your candidate is not God. Take a step back and really look hard at what’s happing in American and the world. I don’t understand how two groups of people can hear the same news and only hear what they want even if what they want completely conflicts with the facts presented.

tags: Molly Ivins, Karl Rove, Joe Wilson, Iraq, FBI, ACLU, George W. Bush, politics

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