As the Plame outing scandal erupts, with new revelations every day, there's one more sinister manipulation to remember--the timing of the run-up to the Iraq War.
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post examined the White House's motivation at the time (9/16/02): "Two weeks ago, the headlines were about a lethargic economy, a depressed stock market and corporate misdeeds; the news about Iraq was about policy disagreements among Bush advisers. Now, the debate has shifted almost entirely from Democrats' preferred domestic issues to preparations for military action, a GOP favorite."
Note the salience of this next point (emphasis added):
"It's hard not to notice that the sudden urgency of war with Iraq has coincided precisely with the emergence of the corporate scandal story, with the flip in the congressional [poll] numbers and with the decline in the Republicans' prospects for retaking the Senate majority," said Jim Jordan, director of the Democrats' Senate campaign committee. "It's absolutely clear that the administration has timed the Iraq public relations campaign to influence the midterm elections . . . and to distract the voting public from a failing economy and an unpopular Republican domestic agenda."
Milbank reminds the reader that it was only a few days before that Andy Card had uttered his most famous phrase: "...Andrew H. Card Jr., Bush's chief of staff, said last week that the White House held back on promoting the Iraq policy in the summer because, 'from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August'."
The Bush Administration let on that it had new and secret information that necessitated fast action, before the November mid-term elections. Milbank pointed this out, too: "Although the administration has not offered new evidence publicly, it suggests such information has played a role. 'What's happening, of course, is we're getting additional information that, in fact, [Hussein] is reconstituting his biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs and that's what really precipitates the concern now,' Cheney said on Rush Limbaugh's radio show Friday."
More Cheney propaganda, on the "pompous blowhard on loan from God" show.
Let's remember one more point--the first President Bush at least had the decency to keep his invasion of Iraq largely separated from the 1990 mid-term elections.
His son's Administration, lacking the same sense of honor and looking for a right-wing realignment, used the hype over Hussein to take the Senate back from newly-Independent Jim Jeffords and the Democrats in 2002.
What can we do about it now? Just remind voters that the son was more deceitful that the father.
And remember it, to make sure the historians get it right when they try to explain this period to our youngsters...