New Mexico’s Steve
Pearce got some mention in the national press on the matter of Iraq — as yet another bullying demagogue. mjh
Another Set of Scare Tactics By E. J. Dionne Jr.
There is a great missing
element in the argument over whether the administration manipulated the facts. Neither side wants to talk about the context in which Bush
won a blank check from Congress to invade Iraq. He doesn’t want us to remember that he injected the war debate into the 2002 midterm
election campaign for partisan purposes, and he doesn’t want to acknowledge that he used the post-Sept. 11 mood to do all he
could to intimidate Democrats from raising questions more of them should have raised. …
He pressured Congress for a
vote before the 2002 election, and the war resolution passed in October. …
Grand talk about liberating Iraq gave way to cheap
partisan attacks. In New Mexico, Republican Steve Pearce ran an advertisement against Democrat John Arthur Smith
declaring: “While Smith ‘reflects’ on the situation, the possibility of a mushroom cloud hovering over a U.S. city still remains.” Note
that Smith wasn’t being attacked for opposing the war, only for reflecting on it. God forbid that any Democrat dare even think
before going to war. …
The bad faith of Bush’s current argument is staggering. He wants to
say that the “more than a hundred Democrats in the House and Senate” who “voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power” thereby
gave up their right to question his use of intelligence forever after. But he does not want to acknowledge that he forced the war
vote to take place under circumstances that guaranteed the minimum amount of reflection and debate, and that opened anyone who
dared question his policies to charges, right before an election, that they were soft on Hussein.
By linking the war on terrorism
to a partisan war against Democrats, Bush undercut his capacity to lead the nation in this fight. And by resorting to partisan attacks
again last week, Bush only reminded us of the shameful circumstances in which the whole thing started.