Sissy Willis links to an American Spectator article by Joseph Shattan, a senior speechwriter for President Bush with, as Sissy notes, the rather provactive title, “The Man Who Elected Obama.” Shattan’s essay is a road map, in his estimation, of how the fumbling of the WMD issue by Rove, which he now admits in his new memoirs, paved the way for the media to promote a neophyte far left senator as America’s savior.
Shattan argues that Rove left the Bush administration dangling in the wind by letting the Democrats and their media allies get away with the Big Lie that GW had taken the nation to war on the “false” premise that Saddam had never had weapons of mass destruction:
Rove goes on to call the Democrats’ claim that Bush lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction a “poison-tipped dagger aimed at the heart of the Bush presidency,” and notes that “by July 2005 a majority of Americans — 51 percent — believed that Bush had deliberately misled them.”
This number is quite close to the 52 percent of Americans who voted fort Obama in 2008.
In fact, as Shattan points out, Saddam had indeed had such weapons but transferred them to Syria on the eve of the war. Karl Rove might have made an issue of it, but would it have really made a difference, given the Fourth Estate’s “Bush’s fault” mindset? We kind of doubt it. As we wrote in Shattan’s comments:
Regarding Karl Rove’s failure to promulgate the fact that Saddam had moved his WMDs to Syria, I, as a blogger and reader of blogs back then knew about it, blogged about it, tore my hair out about it. I place the blame squarely upon the stooped shoulders of the legacy media, who surely knew at least as much as I but chose to ignore any information that might inconveniently contradict their “Bush lied, people died” narrative.
Read the whole thing.
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