Perfection Vs. The Good

David Limbaugh's latest article is an attempt to make a virtue out of President Bush's failures in the War on Terror. As you might expect it's largely built around distorting Liberals position as well as history. Take this crowd pleasing claim.

President Bush inherited the War on Terror. He didn't have the choice of inaction, like President Clinton before him.

President Clinton, as anybody with a passing knowledge of history and lacking the blinders of partisanship knows, fought the war on terror far more vigorously than President Bush did for his first 9 months in office. In fact, President Clinton's vigor in pursuing terrorism convinced President Bush to put terrorism on the back burner (for the first 9 months of his presidency). I mean anything President Clinton cared so much about had to be pointless, right?

But telling the truth about this history wouldn't serve the over arching mythology of Conservativism, so they leave it out.

Anyway after glossing over President Bush's failure to anticipate September 11, 2001, he moves on to his main task, putting a pleasing task over the pre-war intelligence failures in the run up to Iraq.

If not American society as a whole, the Democrats for sure demand clairvoyance from this president. They say that because we didn't find WMD stockpiles in Iraq, he lied in saying they were there. But since when has lying been defined as affirming something as true you believed at the time was true, but later discovered might not have been? Democrats have also condemned Bush for failing to anticipate, with certainty, all the consequences of removing Saddam, including the intramural sectarian strife -- which has been exaggerated by the antiwar media.

I do want to take a moment to clarify something. When I referenced pre-war intelligence failures, you might have assumed I meant that our intelligence services failed to provide President Bush enough information to make sound decisions in the run up to the Iraq war. Actually, it's clear from the record that they did. Bush and his cronies were warned that the case for Weapons of Mass Destruction was not nearly as strong as they claimed it to be. They were warned about the possibility of massive resistance and sectarian violence. They ignored both warnings because they had already decided on the policy. Warnings were irrelevant in the face of their determination to invade Iraq.

So it wasn't a failure of information - it was a failure of intelligence. And claiming now that nobody could have known, well, there are assuredly people eager to believe that. But those interested in the truth will probably know better.