Losing sight

It’s amazing, the spin that can be put onto an observation. With the ‘just sixteen little words’ stance, the right-wing spin has been that ‘oh, how can you point to those sixteen words and say that we went to war based on them?’ It’s really frustrating to see people gettting sucked into the sixteen words argument, because that’s not what it’s about at all. This particular statement is more a fulcrum than a lever. What it is indicating is not that we went to war based on lies, but that the Bush administration was scraping for every little shred of evidence to justify going to war and occupying Iraq.

Let’s step back a bit and remember the opposition to the war in the first place. It was on principles far more lofty than the veracity of this statement can ever aspire to. The fact that it was false, and stated like so many other words of this administration with the intent to mislead and manipulate, supports the idea that people within the President’s administration had war as a goal for which they sought support (top-down), not as the necessary conclusion of a body of evidence. Do not fall into the subtle tactical traps of the republican spinners, be sure that you do not weaken the original rights.