Guns for sale

Six Dumb Arguments We’re Hearing About the Aurora Shooting

And the two articles referenced: BATTLEGROUND AMERICA and To Keep and Bear Arms

But... isn't owning a gun supposed to stop gun deaths? /snark

An NRA victory

Another massacre brought to you by the NRA and the gun companies to celebrate our freedoms.

Listen to Bill Moyers on our obsession with guns

And then take a look at the NRA cult.

And realize that we are being told we must accept the deaths of innocents by crazies like this because the gun companies need to make money.

Freedom.  It tastes like death.

Update:  Bill O'Reilly calls Bill Moyers dumb.  I won't listen to the pompous ego-bloated smug bastard, but I'm sure Moyers could smack O'Reilly into next week with just a few choice words.

Apparently we must accept the deaths of innocents

Because protesting them would be denying the gun companies ... I mean denying gun-loving Merikans their freedoms. We are helpless and must accept we are being controlled by terrorist organizations ... I mean corporations who own our elected officials and make money by causing death ... I mean freedom.

Just imagine the rumpus if the killer had been Muslim....

When Bush was selected for president, there were those of us who bet

That we would be at war with Iraq within his first term. So this is no surprise:

A new book by the author Ron Suskind claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein.

Suskind writes in “The Way of the World,” to be published Tuesday, that the alleged forgery – adamantly denied by the White House – was designed to portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war.

The author also claims that the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official “that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.”

Saddam had crumbs of yellowcake on his evil mustache

Daniel De Groot of Open Left:

I noted last night that a supply of uranium from Iraq had been successfully moved to Montreal in secrecy.

If you check into this, you'll quickly find that the uranium a) was not weapons grade and b) was well known to the UN and IAEA and was being stored legally by Saddam's government. It was legally in Iraq according to international law.

I wondered if the right wing echo chamber would use this as "proof" that the WMD claims were true after all. I got even better than I hoped, as not only do they use it that way, but they reveal how dishonest they are by the way they have done this.

De Groot then quoted from the blogs that proceeded predictably to do this very thing.

Bush was wrong. We know he was wrong. The American people know he was wrong. The world knows he was wrong. His glorious shiny 6 week war that would pop the clogs off Saddam and pop Chalabi into office went horribly horribly wrong. The wonderful war and decider commander guy president that would ensure a thousand year Republican Reich didn't happen. There were no weapons of mass destruction because the weapons of mass destruction Rumsfeld sold him had gone past their 'use by' date. Soldiers and innocents have died or been maimed in this glorious war on weapons of mass destruction program related activities. Saddam died, Georgie got his gun, but still the war grinds on.

Why did we attack and invade a sovereign country that had nothing to do with 9/11, Georgie? You'll be explaining yourself for the rest of your life, you know.

After all, it's your legacy we're talking about.

Only 935?

Ohhhh, this is just counting the lies about Iraq, not about all the other stuff.

WASHINGTON - A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

[snip]

The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.

"It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to al-Qaida," according to Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith of the Fund for Independence in Journalism staff members, writing an overview of the study. "In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003."

Named in the study along with Bush were top officials of the administration during the period studied: Vice President Dick Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan.

Bush led with 259 false statements, 231 about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 28 about Iraq's links to al-Qaida, the study found. That was second only to Powell's 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq and al-Qaida.

The center said the study was based on a database created with public statements over the two years beginning on Sept. 11, 2001, and information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches and interviews.

The question we should really be asking is .... just exactly when did this administration ever tell the truth?
crossposted at SteveAudio