Unfortunately not answering back the charges made it much worse as the Democrats took more liberties with pounding day after day on President Bush knowing full well they had seen the same intelligence. There were WMD's -- any thinking person knows those convoys leaving Iraq prior to the invasion were not carrying groceries. The United Nations was useless as usual but the US kept going back for more resolutions so that gave Sadaam ample time to rid of the WMD's from Iraq before the invasion he knew was coming. Are the WMD's still in Syria or have the Russians removed them back to Russia?
It wasn't only the WMD's but they were the first issue of the not answering back charges. As the years went on and more charges were leveled on a host of issues, the President stayed quiet. He went from the President with a backbone of steel after 9/11 to being too nice in trying to get along with people from a party that wanted to destroy him.
This is why many of his most loyal supporters in 2000 still don't understand why he would never answer back the false charges and take the offensive not be on the defensive. Rove can take the blame, but the ultimate blame lies with President George W. Bush who allowed it to continue.
How the Democrats treated President Bush has zero impact on our comments against Obama. We do not like his agenda and frankly did not like the people he was friends with or mentored by for years. That doesn't even account for the fact that he will not release documents pertaining to his life from his birth to legislative record in Illinois and everything in between. He is a closed book which leaves people to speculate since he has spent almost $2M to keep his birth certificate a secret. Why?
The well was poisoned back in the 1992 campaign when the Democrats who had convinced President GHW Bush to raise taxes after his giving a pledge of "Read my Lips -- NO New Taxes" turned around and charged Pres Bush for breaking his pledge in ad after ad. Then in that 1992 campaign Carville convinced Ross Perot to get back in the race and siphoned votes away from Bush. Perot kept coming up with some of the strangest comments against President Bush that the media pushed. Politics took a nasty turn in 1992. You could say that James Carville brand of politics helped inflame the politics of personal destruction that we see today.
As long as Democrats rely on 'Blame Bush' and voter fraud to win elections, the poisoned well in DC will never get fixed.
OPINION JULY 15, 2010
My Biggest Mistake in the White House
Failing to refute charges that Bush lied us into war has hurt our country.
By KARL ROVE
Seven years ago today, in a speech on the Iraq war, Sen. Ted Kennedy fired the first shot in an all-out assault on President George W. Bush's integrity. "All the evidence points to the conclusion," Kennedy said, that the Bush administration "put a spin on the intelligence and a spin on the truth." Later that day Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle told reporters Mr. Bush needed "to be forthcoming" about the absence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
Thus began a shameful episode in our political life whose poisonous fruits are still with us.
The next morning, Democratic presidential candidates John Kerry and John Edwards joined in. Sen. Kerry said, "It is time for a president who will face the truth and tell the truth." Mr. Edwards chimed in, "The administration has a problem with the truth."
The battering would continue, and it was a monument to hypocrisy and cynicism. All these Democrats had said, like Mr. Bush did, that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD. Of the 110 House and Senate Democrats who voted in October 2002 to authorize the use of force against his regime, 67 said in congressional debate that Saddam had these weapons. This didn't keep Democrats from later alleging something they knew was false—that the president had lied America into war.
Senate Intelligence Chairman Bob Graham organized a bipartisan letter in December 2001 warning Mr. Bush that Saddam's "biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs . . . may be back to pre-Gulf War status," and enhanced by "longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies." Yet two years later, he called for Mr. Bush's impeachment for having said Saddam had WMD.
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On July 9, 2004, Mr. Graham's fellow Democrat on Senate Intelligence, Jay Rockefeller, charged that the Bush administration "at all levels . . . used bad information to bolster the case for war." But in his remarks on Oct. 10, 2002, supporting the war resolution, he said that "Saddam's existing biological and chemical weapons capabilities pose real threats to America."
Even Kennedy, who opposed the war resolution, nonetheless said the month before the vote that Saddam's "pursuit of lethal weapons of mass destruction cannot be tolerated." But he warned if force were employed, the Iraqi dictator "may decide he has nothing to lose by using weapons of mass destruction himself or by sharing them with terrorists."
Then there was Al Gore, who charged on June 24, 2004, that Mr. Bush spent "prodigious amounts of energy convincing people of lies" and accused him of treason, bellowing that Mr. Bush "betrayed his country." Yet just a month before the war resolution debate, the former vice president said, "We know that [Saddam] has stored away secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country."
Top Democrats led their party in making the "Bush lied, people died" charge because they wanted to defeat him in 2004. That didn't happen. Several bipartisan commissions would later catalogue the serious errors in the intelligence on which Mr. Bush and Democrats relied. But these commissions, particularly the Silberman-Robb report of March 31, 2005, found that the "Bush lied" charge was false. Still, the attacks hurt: When they began, less than a third of Americans believed the charge. Two years later, polls showed that just over half did.
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