More BushCo Lies: Liberal Ratings and Iraq War

First Read demolishes the "liberal ratings" of Kerry and Edwards bandied about by the GOP.  The ratings they use for negative ads are skewed because the senators John missed lots of votes due to being on the campaign trail.  More representative records, from when they were not missing votes due to being on the campaign trail, tell a completely different story.  This little nugget will be especially helpful for convincing voters here in the south that don't want to vote for Bush again but are apprehensive about voting for a "liberal":

The values debate

First, for those of you who have memorized the Bush campaign charge that Kerry ranks as the Senate's most liberal member and that Edwards is fourth, National Journal, the nonpartisan magazine which compiles these ratings, shows in its most recent issue that those scores were just for 2003, when Kerry and Edwards were absent for many of the votes used to compute the ratings (because they were campaigning across the country).

Indeed, according to the magazine, in 1999, Kerry was the 16th most liberal Senator and Edwards was 31st.  In 2000, Kerry ranked 23rd and Edwards was 19th.  In 2001, Kerry was 11th and Edwards 35th.  And in 2002, Kerry was 8th and Edwards 40th.

And for those of you, like my buddy Armando, who are nervous about the fallout from the Senate Intelligence report, I think this piece from the Boston Globe gives a good hint of what the official response from Kerry/Edwards will be.  Edwards isn't buying the implication that Cheney didn't hype the evidence and Kerry gives a behind the scenes explanation for why he now believes Bush never really cared what the evidence said but made false assurances to get support for the war.  Kerry also says Saudis and others told him in early 2002 that the decision seemed to have already been made but that he discounted that after the personal assurances from Bush to exhaust all diplomatic options before going to war:

But yesterday, in an interview on their campaign plane in which the candidates also discussed the possibility of financing their campaign outside the public funding system, Edwards said Vice President Dick Cheney probably pressured the Central Intelligence Agency to skew its work in support of the war.

"We know that Dick Cheney spent significant amounts of time at the CIA," Edwards said. "We know that the administration was aware, because all of us were becoming increasingly aware, of the problems within the intelligence community."

Kerry said Bush had personally misled him into casting his vote to support the war by indicating that the administration would exhaust diplomatic options before using force. In fact, Kerry said several Middle Eastern leaders, including Saudis, had told him the Bush administration was committed to war more than a year before the actual invasion. But he set aside his concerns after receiving assurances from President Bush.

"The president went back on his word," Kerry said. "I take that personally."

He added: "Evidence is mounting significantly that they made a decision, then framed an argument to support it. I think there are very serious questions about that that remain to be answered."

Kerry nodded his assent to Edwards's comments, adding that he has become convinced that the invasion had been based on flawed intelligence, particularly on tips from Iraqi exiles such as Ahmed Chalabi, the longtime head of an Iraqi group with ties to conservative members of the Bush administration.

"If someone had told me it was Mr. Chalabi and his crowd, I would have discounted by exponential factors what I was hearing and had a very different set of reactions," Kerry said. "I believe that the evidence is mounting that this administration made a decision to go to war and then fashioned a support structure for that decision."

Kerry described a trip he made to the Middle East in January 2002, when he met with President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, King Abdullah II of Jordan, and top members of Saudi Arabia's ruling family, and was told they believed the Bush administration had already decided on a course for war.

"They said to me that it was their strong belief that the administration was very clear that they wanted to go do this. They didn't have a specific timing," Kerry said.

But after Kerry returned to the United States, the Bush administration, despite its initial belligerent position, had sent him signals that it would exhaust diplomacy first.

"I was convinced at that point in time, that while Cheney and company wanted to go in, the president had backed off and made a new decision," he said, adding that signals also had come from prominent Republicans like Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, former secretary of state James A. Baker III, former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, and former President George H. W. Bush. The conditions were established for comprehensive diplomacy, said Kerry.

When a president sets "those kinds of conditions and sets them personally, as a condition of a senator's vote, as that senator, I take that personally," said Kerry, expressing dismay that Bush subsequently invaded Iraq far more quickly than Kerry had expected.

Asked if Bush had lied to him, Kerry said: "Look, those are all the words of politics. The bottom line is that the president abused the authority that we gave him. The president went back on his word. You use the words you want."  

Finally, this headline from the Associated Press  shows the potential fallout with the republican party:

Some Key Conservatives Uneasy About Iraq

•  tips jar

  by mikepridmore on Mon Jul 12, 2004 at 08:40:55 AM PDT