Your morning dose of Rich

To Live and Shave in LA (great blog name, eh?) has reprinted NY Times' Frank Rich's Op Ed piece, Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt . . . It's behind the NY Times Select firewall, which I won't pay for (Judy Miller) on general principle (Judy Miller). Rich does his usual fine job summarizing the Administration's falsehoods vis a vis the run up to war. To someone who has been following the news, there's no new material here. Yet the punch line, delivered in the last two paragraphs, warrants emphasis. Quick snip: "No debate about the past, of course, can undo the mess that the administration made in Iraq. But the past remains important because it is a road map to both the present and the future. Leaders who dissembled then are still doing so. [My emphasis -- D.] Indeed, they do so even in the same speeches in which they vehemently deny having misled us then - witness Mr. Bush's false claims about what prewar intelligence was seen by Congress and Mr. Cheney's effort last Monday to again conflate the terrorists of 9/11 with those "making a stand in Iraq." . . . . These days Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney routinely exaggerate the readiness of Iraqi troops, much as they once inflated Saddam's W.M.D.'s." Did Cheney really think he could say, "We're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history" and not expect it to get thrown back into his face? Those who forget history . . . On that last note, Rich offers up an interesting tidbit (which was news to me): As Scott Shane reported in The New York Times last month, Vietnam documents are now off limits, too: the National Security Agency won't make public a 2001 historical report on how American officials distorted intelligence in 1964 about the Gulf of Tonkin incident for fear it might "prompt uncomfortable comparisons" between the games White Houses played then and now to gin up wars. It wasn't that long ago that the victor had free rein to write its own history. Bush and Cheney think that rule still applies; but this is the Information Age, and history will not be written, rewritten, edited, or fabricated by the hands of a few dishonest men. More from me later, droogs. D. Technorati tags: Frank Rich, Bush, Cheney