From the AP, via Yahoo News:

Even before Bush finished speaking, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid issued a statement claiming that Bush “recycled his tired rhetoric of ‘stay the course’ and once again missed an opportunity to lay out a real strategy for success in Iraq that will bring our troops safely home.”

The Nevada senator charged that Bush failed to meet a call by the Senate to tell Americans the administration’s strategy for success in Iraq.

But just a few lines later in the same article:

…The president’s address was accompanied by the release of a 35-page White House document titled “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.”

Just another piece of evidence showing the leaders of the Democratic party will say anything to undermine the president and the war effort. They remain completely separated from reality. So much for all that B.S. yesterday about Bush signaling acceptance of the Murtha strategy, more or less.

Here is the Washington Post account of the president’s speech.

More reaction from CA Conservative, The Indepundit, and Michelle Malkin. Also linked at The Mudville Gazette Open Post.

Someone named Fred Kaplan, writing for Slate, denounces President Bush for a speech the president has not yet delivered, based on accounts from unnamed sources in an article he read in the Los Angeles Times. Clear enough?

The article is fairly dull boilerplate anti-Iraq liberation stuff, but it caught our eye as another example of the propensity for BDS* sufferers to say anything, without any regard for truth or reality. The entire article is based on nothing; it’s the Seinfeld of anti-war articles. The president’s critics could at least wait until he makes a speech before criticizing it.

But this line jumped out as a strong indicator of BDS:

Expect soon after (if not during the speech itself) the thing that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have, just this month, denounced as near-treason — a timetable for withdrawal of American troops.

But of course this is complete hogwash. Neither the president nor the vice president has said anything of the sort. It’s pure fantasy. They have stated very clearly their disagreement with the idea of a withdrawal timetable. But the notion that criticism of those arguing for a timetable is akin to calling them “traitors” or amounts to “questioning their patriotism” is frankly just loony. This is just one more small example of the psychosis that has taken over President Bush’s opponents.

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What’s to say? He took bribes. He took big bribes. He violated the public trust. He’s a criminal. He deserves prison.

And how’s this for a biased headline? – “Corrupt Bush ally resigns in shame” They’ve got to tie everything wrong in the world to President Bush somehow, right?

What’s to say? He murdered four people. He deserves the death penalty.

We’ve written a number of posts condemning the Democrats’ irresponsible slanders of the Bush administration about the leadup to the liberation of Iraq. The people seem to be getting it. The Washington Post reports:

Democrats fumed last week at Vice President Cheney’s suggestion that criticism of the administration’s war policies was itself becoming a hindrance to the war effort. But a new poll indicates most Americans are sympathetic to Cheney’s point.

Seventy percent of people surveyed said that criticism of the war by Democratic senators hurts troop morale — with 44 percent saying morale is hurt “a lot,” according to a poll taken by RT Strategies. Even self-identified Democrats agree: 55 percent believe criticism hurts morale, while 21 percent say it helps morale.

The results surely will rankle many Democrats, who argue that it is patriotic and supportive of the troops to call attention to what they believe are deep flaws in President Bush’s Iraq strategy. But the survey itself cannot be dismissed as a partisan attack. The RTs in RT Strategies are Thomas Riehle, a Democrat, and Lance Tarrance, a veteran GOP pollster.

Their poll also indicates many Americans are skeptical of Democratic complaints about the war. Just three of 10 adults accept that Democrats are leveling criticism because they believe this will help U.S. efforts in Iraq. A majority believes the motive is really to “gain a partisan political advantage.”

The problem, to repeat, is not Democrats calling “attention to what they believe are deep flaws in President Bush’s Iraq strategy.” The problem is Democrats making deliberately, knowingly false charges against the president and the administration for partisan gain, in the middle of a war. As we’ve noted before, the president and vice president have explicitly stated that criticism of their policies is legitimate. It’s either sloppy or disingenuous for the press to ignore that important distinction at this point.

(Via Sister Toldjah, who has more analysis, links, and a link to the poll results)

We were going to make the effort and debunk Frank Rich’s shameful and dishonest column in yesterday’s NY Times, but thankfully, the NY Sun did it for us.

Those who charge President Bush and Vice President Cheney with lying to get America involved in the war in Iraq, as the New York Times columnist Frank Rich did yesterday, have a special obligation to get the truth correct themselves. It’s one thing for Mr. Rich to disagree with the decision to go to war in Iraq and to blame Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney for the decision. It’s another for Mr. Rich to accuse our elected leaders of misleading the country while the columnist himself goes about misleading readers of The New York Times.

….

Read the whole thing.

…our sentiments exactly, from Lorie Byrd at Polipundit:

Hopefully the violence surrounding the trial will not continue and the former leader of Iraq will receive a fair trial – followed by a fair hanging.

Although a firing squad would be an acceptable alternative.

More Saddam from Michelle Malkin.

Washington Post, November 22, 2005:

Biden Criticizes Bush Policy on Iraq but Opposes a Pullout Deadline

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. added his voice to the growing chorus of Democratic critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, but he rejected calls for a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Washington Post, November 26, 2005:

Time for An Iraq Timetable

By Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Well, aren’t you glad we cleared that up! Biden’s column actually doesn’t seem to call for an explicit timetable. The apparent inconsistency seems to be coming from the Washington Post headline writer, rather than Biden.

Biden in essence reiterates the Bush administration position – train Iraqi troops, build up the new Iraqi government, etc. – but taking the “but we should do it better, faster, etc.” tack that many Democrats who want to have it both ways have been peddling. It’s the old “finger in the wind” strategy.

When we are victorious and begin to withdraw, Biden can say the president was just smart enough to take his advice. If things go badly, he can say he was right, and the president ignored his wise advise.

More on Biden from Captain’s Quarters.

Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who like so many on the left loathes the country that gives him a pampered life, writes:

No Thanks to Thanksgiving

One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting.

In fact, indigenous people have offered such a model; since 1970 they have marked the fourth Thursday of November as a Day of Mourning in a spiritual/political ceremony on Coles Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, one of the early sites of the European invasion of the Americas.

Not only is the thought of such a change in this white-supremacist holiday impossible to imagine, but the very mention of the idea sends most Americans into apoplectic fits — which speaks volumes about our historical hypocrisy and its relation to the contemporary politics of empire in the United States.

That the world’s great powers achieved “greatness” through criminal brutality on a grand scale is not news, of course. That those same societies are reluctant to highlight this history of barbarism also is predictable.

….

Simply put: Thanksgiving is the day when the dominant white culture (and, sadly, most of the rest of the non-white but non-indigenous population) celebrates the beginning of a genocide that was, in fact, blessed by the men we hold up as our heroic founding fathers.

….

Now there’s a guy in the holiday spirit! But don’t you dare question his patriotism.

All of America’s enemies are not in the Middle East, folks.

(link via Michelle Malkin)

Vice President Cheney continued to fight back against the Democrats’ libels of the administration in a speech Monday to the American Enterprise Institute. The AP continued to carry water for the Democratic party. From the AP account (via Yahoo News):

WASHINGTON – Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday said he strongly disagrees with a battle-tested congressman who advocates quickly pulling all U.S. troops from Iraq, calling such a proposal “a dangerous illusion.”

But Cheney stopped short of joining those Republicans who have questioned the patriotism and courage of Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., calling him “a good man, a Marine, a patriot.” Cheney’s subdued comments about Murtha followed those of President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

At the same time, Cheney pressed the administration’s high-voltage attack on war critics, particularly Senate Democrats who voted in October 2002 to give Bush authority to go to war in Iraq and who now oppose his policy, calling them “dishonest and reprehensible.”

As we noted yesterday, the AP is engaging in Democrat-friendly spin. The president and vice president clearly said that criticism of their policies is legitimate. They denounced the dishonest rewriting of history the Democrats are engaging in. It’s not the criticism, it’s the lying, stupid.

Isn’t it interesting that the Democrats and their MSM brethren never provide a quote from a Republican questioning anyone’s patriotism? If Republicans were really going around questioning Democrats’ patriotism all the time, as the Democrats so often suggest, it ought to be easy to find a quote or two to back up the charge. But those quotes seem to be harder to find than Iraq’s WMD.

On the other hand, it’s easy to find quotes from prominent Democrats calling the patriotism of Republicans into question.

Incidentally, that “battle-tested congressman” line is a nice touch, eh?

Update: Here is a transcript of Vice President Cheney’s remarks.

More from Irish Pennants. Also linked at The Mudville Gazette.

Former Senator Bob Graham had an opinion piece published yesterday in the Washington Post, continuing the “Bush lied to us, Democrats are unthinking dupes” line against the liberation of Iraq.

First, Graham claims the Democrats were duped by the president, they failed to do their homework and instead chose to blindly trust the president’s every word. Uh, yeah, right.

. . . Yes, more than 100 Democrats voted to authorize him to take the nation to war. Most of them, though, like their Republican colleagues, did so in the legitimate belief that the president and his administration were truthful in their statements that Saddam Hussein was a gathering menace — that if Hussein was not disarmed, the smoking gun would become a mushroom cloud.

. . . .

No longer will the members of Congress be entitled to accept his veracity. Caveat emptor has become the word. Every member of Congress is on his or her own to determine the truth.

What Graham is saying here is that the Democrats in Congress were derelict in their duty to independently evaluate the intelligence data given to them. Does anyone, anyone, really believe that the Democrats in Congress were operating from a position of blind trust of a Republican administration?

And we must always remember, the consensus view before the war, even before George W. Bush was president, was that Iraq was a threat, had WMD, and was a state sponsor of terrorism. So presumably the Democrats in Congress were suckered by the former administration as well.

Graham continues the “Bush lied to us” libel (emphasis added):

The American people needed to know these reservations, and I requested that an unclassified, public version of the NIE be prepared. On Oct. 4, Tenet presented a 25-page document titled “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs.” It represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed them, avoided a discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version. Its conclusions, such as “If Baghdad acquired sufficient weapons-grade fissile material from abroad, it could make a nuclear weapon within a year,” underscored the White House’s claim that exactly such material was being provided from Africa to Iraq.

But the Bush administration did not claim that “weapons-grade fissile material” was being provided from Africa to Iraq. The Bush adminsitration didn’t claim any nuclear material was being provided from Africa to Iraq. And Senator Graham knows that. The president said the British government had provided information that Iraq has sought to acquire uranium from Africa. The British stand by that assessment. The British did not say any uranium was actually purchased by Iraq. The Bush administration didn’t say that either. The Democrats just keep telling the same lies, over and over again. It’s beyond tiresome.

Also linked at Open Source Media (aka Don Surber)

The AP reports today (via Yahoo News):

After fiercely defending his Iraq policy across Asia, President Bush abruptly toned down his attack on war critics Sunday and said there was nothing unpatriotic about opposing his strategy.

“People should feel comfortable about expressing their opinions about Iraq,” Bush said, three days after agreeing with Vice President Dick Cheney that the critics were “reprehensible.”

But this is nonsense. In his Veterans Day speech, President Bush said explicitly that he was not condemning opposition to his strategy or mere criticism of his administration:

“While it’s perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began,” the president said.

Vice President Cheney also directed his comments to those who are making false allegations, not merely offering criticisms:

And the suggestion that’s been made by some U. S. senators that the President of the United States or any member of this Administration purposely misled the American people on pre-war intelligence is one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city…

The Democrats’ water-carriers in the MSM will not stop peddling this dishonest line that the Bush administration is attempting to quash dissent, but they will be confronted whenever they do so. The truth is too important to allow their lies to go unchecked.

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Also linked at OTB.

Update: Monday morning, 11/21, the WaPo writes the same bogus story. It’s almost looks like plagiarism.