CT Blue

A case can be made that of all the Republican candidates, Trump is the lesser liar of them all.

Hear me out.

There are certain lies that have become so ingrained in the Republican psyche that they have become articles of faith. There is objective truth, and there is Republican truth. No one, not even the “moderate” John Kasich, challenges these articles of faith. Trump takes many of them on directly and forcefully.

All the world knows that George Bush and his administration lied us into a disastrous war in Iraq. All the world, that is, except for Republicans. All the world knows that the World Trade Center was destroyed on George Bush’s watch, and most of the world also knows that he and his administration ignored warnings from their predecessors about Al Qaeda. All the world, except Republicans and compromised Beltway insiders.

Trump isn’t just telling Republicans what all the rest of the world knows, he’s rubbing their noses in it.

And it’s not just Iraq. Trump is also closer to the truth on other foreign policy issues, and despite the bombast, he’s the least inclined to get us into a war in the Mideast. At least words are coming out of his mouth to that effect. Meanwhile, the other candidates cling to the lies (and I would guess that a certain HRC would cling to the one about not knowing Saddam didn’t have WMDs). It’s not just Republicans, it’s also official Beltway dogma: sure, there were no WMDs, but Bush, Cheney and the rest of the criminals truly believed there were, and there was no one who felt otherwise. Witness Joe Klein at Time telling us:

And then he [Trump] launched himself into cloud-cuckooland by asserting that Bush had knowingly lied about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. He “lied us into war…” was, I think, the Trumpian term of art. This is a position that only the left of the left has entertained. The truth is, the U.S. intelligence community was absolutely convinced Saddam had chemical and biological weapons, but not so certain about nuclear capability. The Bush Administration—especially the Cheney-Rumsfeld phalanx—did many questionable and some outright sordid things, but they went to war actually thinking there were WMD in Iraq. It was still one of the two or three worst decisions ever made by an American president, but the casus belli wasn’t faked.

via Time

Klein was a pro-war liberal, who ignored the many voices who were saying at the time that the evidence was fabricated, or at best weak, and he’s heavily invested in covering up his own complicity in legitimizing the war. Here’s someone who knows better:

The actual history is that Iraq had disarmed and the Bush-43 administration did everything it could to prevent the UN from verifying that disarmament so that the draconian sanctions would continue on Iraq indefinitely and could lead to a “regime change” war. [See my time line: accuracy.org/iraq.]

But many Republican candidates and neoconservative ideologues don’t want to give up the false history. The worthies at the Weekly Standard now write: “Interviewers should press Trump on this: What evidence does Trump have that George W. Bush and his top advisers knowingly lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? How many other government officials does Trump believe were in on the deception? What does Trump believe would have been the point of such a lie, since the truth would soon come out?”

In fact, it’s quite provable that the Bush administration lied about Iraqi WMDs before the invasion. I know, I helped document such lies at the Institute for Public Accuracy, where I work, before the 2003 invasion:

In October, 2002, John R. MacArthur, author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, noted: “Recently, Bush cited an IAEA report that Iraq was ‘six months away from developing a weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need.’ The IAEA responded that not only was there no new report, ‘there’s never been a report’ asserting that Iraq was six months away from constructing a nuclear weapon.”

That’s just the tip of the iceberg of what was knowable at the time. See other such news releases from before the invasion: “White House Claims: A Pattern of Deceit” and “Bush’s War Case: Fiction vs. Facts at Accuracy.org/bush” and “U.S. Credibility Problems” and “Tough Questions for Bush on Iraq Tonight.”

via Sam Husseini at Consortium News

I remember those days all too clearly. It wasn’t hard to find people with credentials who said that Bush was cooking the books. So, oddly enough, on Iraq and a host of other issues, Trump is the sole truth teller in a cadre of liars. This is not to say he always tells the truth. Far from it. But compared to the competition, he is George Washington himself. Well, not really, but he still sometimes tells the truth, which is unusual for a Republican. I have no idea what he would do as president, but this one fact gives some (extremely) meager grounds for hope that he wouldn’t be the disaster everyone expects.