Thursday, June 30, 2005

Selective Dem Memory? (Duh.)

A couple of items from The Corner on National Review Online:

How soon some of our liberal friends forget. Among others, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, Charles Schumer, Chris Dodd, John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Biden and Jay Rockefeller voted for the October 11, 2002 congressional joint resolution authorizing the president, on his discretion, to go to war. Here, in part, is what the resolution said:

"Whereas members of al Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq:

"Whereas Iraq continues to aid and harbor other international terroist organizations, including organizations that threaten the lives and safety of United States citizens;

"Whereas the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, underscored the gravity of the threat posed by the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by international terrorist organizations ...

And not a single news person bothered to ask any critics of the president's speech last night how they can square their offense at the president's linking terrorism to the war against Iraq when they did the same exact thing.


...and this a couple of items later (above on the scroll)...

Not surprisingly, my mail indicates the Iraq/al-Qaeda naysayers are relying on the 9/11 Commission mind-bogglingly shoddy "investigation" of ties between Iraq and al Qaeda -- and in so doing going even further than the Commission itself did. The Commission at least acknowledged that there was lots of evidence of ties, but drew a line between ties and "operational" ties in concluding there was no evidence of Iraqi complicity in any particular al Qaeda act of terrorism (meaning the embassy bombings, the Cole bombing, and the 9/11 attacks).

The media, of course picked this ball up and ran with it. So obsessed were they with the "Bush lied" angle, especially in the months before the election, that they further twisted the Commission's gobbledygook, so that the conventional wisdom is now that there was no nexus AT ALL between Iraq and al Qaeda. Indeed, the Times continues this studious chicanery by, for example, avoiding at all costs an even-handed explanation that the Commission merely found there was no evidence of direct complicity in specific terror attacks. Instead, it blares in today's editorial that Iraq had "nothing whatsoever" to do with terror attacks. That's not far from me saying I have nothing whatsoever to do with publishing this post because I'm merely writing it and it's NRO and it's emir, K-Lo, who decide what gets posted on the site.

But even if what these guys were saying was true, it is a serious felony in this country to provide MATERIAL SUPPORT to terror organizations. That's a law that was enacted in 1996, during the Clinton Administration, with broad bipartisan support, including by many Democrats still in congress who are complaining about the President's allusions to 9/11. We enacted that law out of a recognition that terror networks cannot succeed without being facilitated in their day-to-day existence by others: recruiting, training, harboring, financing, etc.

Is there anyone who really doubts, on the basis of the record even as undeveloped as we know it is, that Saddam's regime provided material support to al Qaeda such that it would be convicted if it were charged with that crime? Why is it that Saddam Hussein is somehow the only guy on the planet who has "nothing whatsoever" to do with terrorism unless his fingerprints end up on a bomb? For everyone else our standard is: if you help terrorists in any way, you're gone. Not Iraq, though.


Indeed.

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