Before a friendly audience in Fresno, Karl Rove, former senior adviser to President George W. Bush, continued his campaign to rewrite history about whether Bush misled the country about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. Now Rove is claiming Bush led the nation into war on the basis of the same intelligence that Democrats saw when they decided to support the war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
We shouldn't be surprised that Rove, the master of political spin, is using his book tour to confuse the public about what occurred in the Bush White House as operatives ramped up public opinion in favor of invading Iraq seven years ago. Weapons of mass destruction were never found in Iraq, and now Bush loyalists are trying to explain their way out of the administration's decision to lead us into war.
But Rove's utterances shouldn't go unchallenged when they are at odds with the facts. The nation must understand what happened as we charged into war in Iraq, and Rove's revisionism isn't offering clarity to the discussion.
Rove spoke at a fundraiser Tuesday for Fresno County Supervisor Debbie Poochigian and was also touting his book, "Courage and Consequence." In his Fresno speech, Rove said that if Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction, so did Democrats who saw the same intelligence as Bush, and reached the same conclusion. Rove's conclusion is just absurd.
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