Tuesday, October 09, 2007

In war truth is the first casualty

On the October 6 edition of Fox News' The Beltway Boys, co-host and Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes claimed:

You know, I've thought for a long time that Obama's not in quite as strong a position on the war in Iraq as he really thinks he is. Remember, when he famously came out against the war, it was back in a time when the entire world believed that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, that he would probably be willing to use them himself at some time or pass them along to terrorists who would use them. And yet, Barack Obama was against going to the war at that point. I don't think that shows that he is very strong on national security, which he needs to be. But that argument's not going to be used against him in the Democratic primaries. It would, however, by Republicans in a general election.


A lot has been said about this already in other blogs but I want to comment on how this quote illustrates perfectly how the debate over the war in Iraq is a battle in which we have truth on one side and lies and deceit on the other. In the quote above Fred Barnes is denying that in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq anyone believed what the Iraqis and the U.N. weapons inspectors and others were telling us, what we now know to be the truth, that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. Fred Barnes is claiming that Barack Obama believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (since that is what everyone believed) and yet still opposed the war. The possibility that Barack Obama opposed the war because he did not believe what the Bush Administration was saying, that he was right when so many others were wrong, does not seem to be a thought that Fred Barnes is capable of entertaining. Think about the implications of that.

These are people whose whole world view is so completely divorced from reality that they can not, as shown by this quote, recognize the truth when it is staring them in the face.

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