One day in third grade our principal came in and said he had an announcement.

That announcement?

Bill Clinton declared we had to go to school on Saturdays now. He said some other things that I don’t remember now, but I completely believed it. I was on the verge of tears, being a gullible and ignorant little kid. But alas, it was April Fool’s day. I was very relieved.

There’s a moral to this story. I was taken in by such ridiculousness as a third grader. What makes grown men fall for stories about the Clintons that are almost as silly?

If you believe supporters of the Iraq war, Bush was perfectly honest with us about pre-war intelligence because Clinton thought Iraq had WMDs too. I hope people realize that this is nothing more than a partisan attempt to avoiding answering substantive questions about Bush’s pre-war conduct.

Clinton didn’t go to war with Iraq. This is the central fact. Leaders that take us to war are to be held to the highest standard. They must evaluate all the evidence thoroughly. Only then should they be given the benefit of the doubt if they turn out to be incorrect. It should also be pointed out that most of the claims the Bush administration made were not made by Clinton. Only the broad opinion that Iraq had some for of WMDs or WMD programs was shared. Did Bush meet the necessary standard? Absolutely not. Let’s take a look at what we now know.

In Powell’s 2003 UN speech he relied on claims by an al-Qaeda prisoner that Iraq had trained members of al-Qaeda. We now know the DIA believed that information to be incorrect. Powell’s chief of staff claims they were not aware of this information.

The claim that Iraq had mobile bio-weapons labs was based on a defector named “Curveball” who was considered him unstable and his allegations second-hand by German intelligence. The only American agent to meet with him found him to be an unreliable alcoholic. It’s possible that the Bush administration didn’t know of this, but if they didn’t, it seems to indicate pressuring the CIA for a desired conclusion, according to this quote:

As I said last night, let’s keep in mind the fact that this war’s going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn’t say, and the Powers That Be probably aren’t terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he’s talking about. However, in the interest of Truth, we owe somebody a sentence or two of warning, if you honestly have reservations.

Aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq were deemed “irrefutable” evidence of a nuclear program by Cheney. We now know that the Department of Energy (after consulting centrifuge experts) and the State Department believed otherwise. This one is my mind is particularly egregious.

The infamous yellowcake from uranium claim. As best we can tell, this was based on crudely forged documents from Niger. The CIA attempted to persuade the Bush administration not to make this claim in the SOTU, but was overruled.

The claim that Saddam possessed aerial drones that could attack the U.S. with biological or chemical weapons has also been shown to have been suspect. The Air Force believed they could not reach the U.S. and doubted they were made to deliver WMDs.

The overall claims of Iraq-al-Qaeda connections have turned out to be wrong and distorted. The CIA told Bush in September of 2001 that there was little evidence of any significant connection between the two. Also witness the claims of Cheney about Atta’s meeting in Prague, claims that were made after they were debunked by the FBI and Czech intelligence. Also, consider the claims of defector that he helped Saddam’s men bury WMDs in Iraq that were cited by the White House. The defector failed a polygraph and the CIA believed he had made up the account in attempt to get a visa.

This isn’t everything. The Bush administration frequently went beyond simply believing Iraq had WMDs and claimed they “knew” it to be true and knew where the weapons were specifically. There was never agreement about Iraq having a nuclear program, yet the specter of a mushroom cloud was invoked. When the UN inspectors, armed with intelligence shared by us, failed to find an WMDs, this didn’t give the administration a moment of pause. This demonstrates a pattern of at best negligence and at worst outright distortion. This is not the standard we should require of our leaders in taking us to war. I hope that war supporters will eventually put aside partisan politics and engage in a real debate about this issue. Perhaps a case can be made that these errors were honest and understandable mistakes. We won’t know until war supporters ditch the vacuous talking points.

Obviously my submitted letter will be a bit shorter, but I like the full one better.

It seems submitting letters is broken at the moment. Comical indeed.

Tinsley also creates the impression that the bill Clinton vetoed was specific to the tax, when in fact it was in an appropriations bill:

The phone tax provision was part of the larger Treasury Department appropriations bill. The president said he had no problem with the bill itself and had even voiced his approval of the phone tax provision. But Clinton used his veto pen just before midnight Oct. 30 to send a message to Congress. He had wanted money for education programs in the bill, too. When it wasn’t added, he axed the entire measure, leaving the phone tax intact.

For that last question, I tend to think no. Bush appears to have skipped out on time in the Guard, disobeying orders. I think that’s bigger than avoiding the draft, especially for a war he didn’t support. Neither did anything illegal, it appears (neither were arrested), though. And on both issues, the public didn’t really care.

Also, Bush’s Guard service was mostly ignored in 2000. I’d say this time period is more comparable to Clinton in 1992, with neither being incumbents. Of course, this means comparing Clinton in 1996 with Bush in 2004, which leaves coverage of Bush ahead. But then, no new information was discovered in 1996, and there were no documents Clinton was withholding that could have cleared his name.

Back to the MRC report. Does the coverage of Bush’s Vietnam-era service outweigh Clinton’s (or Clinton’s lack of)? A quick scan of reports from the nightly news broadcasts of NBC, CBS, and ABC, looks like this:

Bush-National Guard:

7 CBS
5 ABC
7 NBC

Clinton’s draft avoidance:

4 ABC
4 CBS
- NBC

LexisNexis doesn’t have NBC Nightly News transcripts before 1996. Giving MRC the benefit of the doubt, they appear to be correct on the number of Clinton stories (they say 10), but over on Bush stories (they say 25). MRC touts this as just two months versus one year, but that’s misleading, seeing as all but one of the Clinton stories I found come from April or earlier. I’d say their point still stands. So is this the “liberal media” going after Bush for something they gave Clinton a pass for? Caveats listed above aside, I’m not really sure. Let’s look at some newspaper coverage (time periods are all roughly the same):

NY Times:

Bush: 13 stories
Clinton: 13 stories

Washington Post:

Clinton: 12 stories
Bush: 16 stories

Note: These are pretty quick perusals and aren’t indicative of type of coverage. They include editorials.

So, pretty close. Those are estimates, and quick ones at that. But the point remains the same. It’s not that clear there was much more coverage, and it’s pretty easy to explain if there was. No “liberal media” allegations needed. And then there’s the fundamental problem with this whole thing: amount of coverage doesn’t really say much. The type of coverage isn’t explored, and that’s what’s important. Another thing about the report: off to the side there’s a picture with 3 quotes. These quotes look pretty obviously true to me. It’s sheer partisan blindness to think Bush military records solve anything. All in all, the MRC seeks to attack the media as left-wing Bush haters, but they present a simplified, maybe exaggerated, account to do it.