Leftist columnist Froma Harrop blamed George Bush for sniper Chris Kyle’s death (creators.com)
I don’t often read columns by Froma Harrop, who leans to the left, but the headline on her recent piece, “What killed the American Sniper,” attracted my attention having seen the movie. I knew how sniper Chris Kyle died. I was living in the Texas hill country at the time and the news of this hero’s death in Stephenville hit the Lone Star State hard.
I should have guessed. It was another attack on gun ownership, but she didn’t stop there. It was Bush’s fault that Kyle had to serve four tours in Iraq, the war that “was sold to the American people on the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”
Over the years, I have written a number of pieces on the Democrat demagogueing of former President George W. Bush with the refrain, “Bush Lied, thousands died.” And as I began writing on this subject, still another time, I was pleased to see the headline, “The Dangerous Lie that ‘Bush Lied’ in the Feb. 8, Wall Street Journal. Click here to read this piece by Laurence H. Silberman.
All of the big guns of the Democrat party – Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi – gave fiery speeches in favor of invading Iraq. But that didn’t stop them from picking up on the “Bush lied” chant.
Of course, we now know there were older WMDs found in Iraq in 2003 when we arrived, and it was plausible that the newer more deployable versions found their way to Syria. James Clapper, then an intelligence officer during the Bush era, claimed this happened “unquestionably,” after viewing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq to Syria in satellite imagery just before the U. S. invasion.
I find it interesting that the liberal New York Times, willing to peddle the “Bush lied” mantra for years, was suddenly concerned with the discovery of WMDs in Syria. Last October it published an eight-part story, “The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons,” reporting that some 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or bombs were found.
Charles Krauthammer has a term for the inability to acknowledge a scintilla of decency in our 43rd president – “Bush Derangement Syndrome.”
“… it is one thing to assert, then or now, that the Iraq war was ill-advised. It is quite another to make the horrendous charge that President Bush lied to or deceived the American people about the threat from Saddam ,” wrote Silberman.
It’s time we put “Bush lied” to bed for good.
