OPINION:
I smelled a rat from Day One of the liberals’ “Bush lied” campaign about 10 years ago. Throughout the last five years of the Bush administration, as the political left continued to savage President Bush and say he “lied us into an unjust, unnecessary, illegal and immoral” war, I kept my eye on the one man who could easily have stood up and spoken the truth but refused: former President Bill Clinton.
Nobody knew better than Mr. Clinton that Iraq had unaccounted-for weapons of mass destruction; he said as much in a July 2003 “Larry King Live” interview. Yet instead of speaking up and shutting down what was an obviously coordinated smear campaign, the normally affable Mr. Clinton became a deaf mute on the issue. In other words, he willingly allowed the office of the presidency to be unjustly attacked by his faithful party operatives. And after years of this relentless, bogus attack, it began to take its toll.
As Karl Rove wrote in his 2010 book “Courage and Consequence,” “The charge did what its critics had hoped. It weakened the Bush presidency. And those who led the charge did grave damage to their country’s ability to win a war it was hotly engaged in. They must have known at the start this would happen, but it was a price they were willing, even eager, to have their nation pay.”
As I always ask the liberal “true believers” who stubbornly refuse to see the obvious: How is it that Mr. Bush, who was charged with the worst crime ever levied against an American president, never had any formal charges or articles of impeachment levied against him? The answer is simple: The whole charge was a lie, and if the Democrats ever did formally charge Mr. Bush, there would be a trial with sworn testimony having to be given. At that point, this whole charade would come crumbling down.
I think this is the biggest unreported story in recent American political history.
EUGENE R. DUNN
Medford, N.Y.
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