If you choose to believe the Democratic mantra that Bush lied about Iraqi WMD to lead us into war against Iraq, feel free to allow your partisanship or gullibility to subsume your powers of discernment. But how about some of the other Democratic rhetorical excesses?
Do they give you the slightest pause, or do you consider gross hyperbole and distortion in furtherance of undermining a commander in chief you dislike a justifiable means to a preferred end?
As we all know, Democrat politicians have been talking about a possible impeachment drive should they gain control of Congress with the 2006 elections.
If Democrats ultimately make headway on impeachment, they have telegraphed that it will be on the grounds that President Bush has usurped constitutional authority and "taken the law into his own hands."
They have been laying the foundation for this since early on in his presidency - sometime after they abandoned the primary theme that he was too stupid to contemplate, much less mastermind a sophisticated scheme to consolidate executive power. Back then, they preferred the template that Bush was an unwitting dupe for the vile, Machiavellian Dick Cheney and subject to the war-whims of Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld and other neoconservative imperialists.
But they eventually figured out that depicting Bush as hopelessly dim would make it tougher to demonize him personally (it's hard to hate a hapless moron). Though they still deride Bush as syntax-challenged, nuance-deprived and a brash Texas cowboy, they now portray him as "dumb like a fox" - a power-mad fox. In no time, Bush went from stupid to stubborn - "a man unwilling to admit his mistakes," "mistake" being defined as any implementation of conservative policy.
They used to say that Condoleezza Rice, just like Cheney, pulled Bush's strings. After all, he couldn't even remember the name of the Pakistani president back then. But at some point, Bush had miraculously transmogrified into a calculating genius who appointed Rice as secretary of state, not because of her brains, but because of her "unquestioning loyalty." In a stunning reversal, she would become his puppet. In the same way, he installed his "yes-man" Alberto Gonzalez, as attorney general.
Indeed, when Bush exercised his perfectly legitimate prerogative to fill his cabinet with these like-minded, trustworthy and highly capable individuals, he was ludicrously accused of "restructuring the government" to surround himself with people who wouldn't offer opposing ideas - in furtherance of his dictatorial aims.
Likewise, when Bush nominated originalists to the federal bench, liberals deceitfully accused him of "stacking the court," attempting to create the impression that he was doing something improper - like FDR did when he tried to restructure the Court in order to add cronies.
Nor was it any accident the left repeatedly compared Bush to Hitler. It was no accident that they said he acted "unilaterally" against Iraq - when he didn't. It was no accident that they held him up as a dangerous enemy of freedom upon passage of the Patriot Act. It has been with utter delight that they've pointed to the NSA surveillance program as another example of his disrespect for civil liberties. And they savored the opportunity to level the preposterous charge that Bush nominated Sam Alito to the Supreme Court because Alito was sympathetic to Bush's grandiose strategy to wrest power from Congress and the courts.
There has been a method to the liberals' madness in accusing Bush of attempting a "dangerous consolidation of power in the executive branch." It may not have begun as a conspiratorial idea to unseat him, but along the way it has ripened into precisely that. And don't think for a second they won't follow through on their impeachment talk if they regain legislative control.
But in the meantime we should take notice of the recklessness of their rhetoric. Bush takes seriously his duty to protect the country. In pushing the Patriot Act, has his goal been to investigate his political enemies or detect and prevent terrorist attacks? Are there any victims of the Act's enforcement? Does he push the NSA monitoring program - which he genuinely and legitimately believes is legal - to eavesdrop on innocent Americans, or those contacted by suspected or known terrorists - with one of the parties to the communication always being outside the country? Are the Democrats who complain about these imaginary victims actually championing civil liberties or opportunistically defaming a national security-oriented president? In all their hype about liberties, does this party of "real security" ever weigh the security implications of their posturing?
Democrats, like senators Leahy and Feingold, keep warning about a breakdown in our constitutional checks and balances. But the truth is: They still work just fine. What they're really mad about is that they're out of power as a result of democratic elections, and it is they who are seeking to upset the constitutional distribution of power.
