Some in the conservative media think it’s wrong to even <i>ask</i> about WMD

Speaking of Iraq’s WMD (see below), I’ve noticed some high-profile media conservatives who have suggested Americans shouldn’t even ask about the administration’s tactics. Their arguments aren’t so much a defense of the Bush administration’s failures as they are a condemnation of those who would have the audacity to question the integrity of the president.

First up is your favorite and mine, Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly. You might recall that O’Reilly stuck his neck out on the WMD issue earlier this year, saying that if we overthrow Hussein’s government and we don’t find the WMD stockpiles, “I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush Administration again.”

Needless to say, O’Reilly has not apologized and he still trusts Bush. What’s worse, he’s now admonishing those who publicly question whether the Bush White House was misleading people about the issue.

“Unfortunately, the WMD situation is now been politicized,” O’Reilly said last Thursday. He added, [I]t is fair to all [for] the hunt for the weapons to continue without these hysterical accusations of lies and deceit. People making those charges are being irresponsible and hurting the country.”

Right, we’re hurting the country. Was O’Reilly hurting the country when he said he’d never trust Bush again if we fail to find the WMD?

Molly Ivins follows up the O’Reilly example with a few of her own in her latest column, and like me, she finds it pretty odd that “suddenly those who ask, ‘So where are these weapons of mass destruction we went to war to over?’ are the problem.”

As Ivins notes, the New York Times’ Bill Safire, a former Nixon speechwriter, complained that “the crowd that bitterly resents America’s mission to root out the sources of terror” is “whipping up its intelligence hoax hype.”

What a bizarre argument. First of all, who are these people who resent “America’s mission to root out the sources of terror”? Is there some kind of liberal cabal that supports terrorism that I’m not aware of? When Bush responded to the attacks of 9/11 with an attack on Afghanistan, he had the support of virtually every Democratic public official in America. The Iraqi invasion, however, was not a justifiable part of the “war on terror,” it was an unprovoked war of choice. Second, don’t accuse Bush’s critics of “whipping up hype,” accuse the administration of it. After all, they’re the ones who’ve exaggerated the Iraqi threat for the last year and a half.

Ivins also notes the unswervingly right-wing editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, which offered a similar sentiment last week.

“[W]ho’s trying to deceive whom here?” the Journal asks. “That Saddam had biological or chemical weapons was a probability that everyone assumed to be true, even those who were against the war.”

Yes, but so what? Critics of the war believed that the White House was probably telling the truth about Iraq’s stockpiles of WMD. If these critics were misled by the administration, it’s the critics who are trying to “deceive”? This is even dumb for the Wall Street Journal.

This is all pretty sad. If conservative ideologues in the national media want to support and believe Bush, that’s to be expected. Bush’s word is good enough for them. But for those of us who are more skeptical about the administration’s claims, many of which have proven to be untrue, the president’s word needs to be accompanied by some additional proof.

Contrary to conservative’s claims, this doesn’t mean we’re “hurting the country” or that we “bitterly resent” the war on terror. It means we expect the government to tell the truth about matters of state and when there’s an apparent disparity between what we’re told and what is true, we expect an explanation.