Rove tries his hand at re-writing history.

Karl Rove, the Rasputin of the Bush White House, has just published his book and, no surprise, he does his dead level best to whitewash the disasterous Bush years. (See Note 1) One of the main lies that Rove tells is that Bush did not lie about Iraq’s weapons just to get Congress to authorize the war. (Do two lies equal a truth? Too often in America, they do.) (See Note 2)

Bush did lie. And his lie has cost not only hundreds of thousands of lives, but perhaps even enough money to push America itself into second class status.

The art of the political lie has been refined to the point that it’s necessary to be very careful in defining it. Here’s mine.

A political lie is the deliberate act of creating false beliefs to achieve a political goal.

A political lie starts with the goal. In Bush’s case, he came into office with the clear, but hidden goal of doing what his father would not do, invade Iraq and destroy Saddam Hussain. Bush believed that Saddam had tried to assassinate his father. (See Note 3) Paul O’Neill, Bush’s Treasury Secretary during the critical time before the invasion, has said that at President Bush’s very first National Security Council meeting there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein needed to go. He adds that going after Saddam was topic “A” 10 days after the inauguration and eight months before 9/11: “Day one, these things were laid and sealed.”

So when 9/11 handed Bush a golden opportunity to seize the emotion of the whole country, does he go after the people responsible? No! He deflects the emotion to justify the hidden goal he had all along. British Prime Minister Tony Blair visited Bush at his Texas ranch in April 2002 – before the invasion – when the Bush lie offensive was in high gear. The British Ambassador to the US, Christopher Meyer, was there too. Testifying to the British Chilcot investigation, Meyer has said that Bush put Blair under extreme pressure to commit to supporting an invasion. Meyer used the words, “signed in blood” to describe how Bush and Blair decided to remove Saddam no matter what – before they brought other people in on it … like Congress, the American people, and the rest of the world in general.

The “deliberate act” of “creating false beliefs” is mainly the active suppression of inconvenient facts and demonizing anyone who gets in your way. As early as Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. None of this was ever told to Congress or the American people.

Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton, has written a book about Bush and he writes at the Salon web site:

On April 23, 2006, CBS’s “60 Minutes” interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who disclosed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD. “We continued to validate him the whole way through,” said Drumheller. “The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.”

(There is a Utah connection, however. On Sept. 8, 2006, our own Orrin Hatch was one of three Republican senators on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence who signed a letter saying that the “60 Minutes” information was all wrong. Hatch was the one who was “all wrong”.)

Who did Bush choose to believe and put up to Congress and the people? A source code-named “Curveball” who was later exposed as a fabricator, con man and former Iraqi taxi driver posing as a chemical engineer.

According to Blumenthal, Bush lied directly in his State of the Union address:

“From three Iraqi defectors,” Bush declared, “we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs … Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He’s given no evidence that he has destroyed them.” In fact, there was only one Iraqi source — Curveball — and there were no labs.

Blumenthal’s Salon article quotes a CIA agent who was trying to get his bosses to reveal the truth at the time. It’s the best summary of the “big lie” of the Bush administration I can think of:

“The fact is there was nothing there, no threat. But Bush wanted to hear what he wanted to hear.”

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Note 1: It seems everybody has published a book now. Except the idiot Bush. He’s had a remarkably low profile since he was chased out of Washington. Rove says he is not “Bush’s Brain” as so many people say. Since Bush himself shows as much brain activity as Terri Schiavo, if we take Rove at his word, that means Bush doesn’t have one!

Note 2: You wouldn’t think that it would be necessary to prove, yet again, that the Bush administration was one big lie from start to finish, but people’s memories are short and the Karl Rove’s amazing ability to mislead and distort cannot be ignored.

Note 3: At a Texas political fund-raiser on Sept. 26, 2002, Bush said of Saddam, “After all, this is a guy who tried to kill my dad at one time.”