Crossposted from West Virginia Blue.
Frequent liar and Republican “strategist” Gary Abernathy, who sadly is becoming even less connected to the truth than when he was executive director of the WV GOP, still hasn’t posted a correction to this post where he clearly made up numbers comparing military deaths under President Bill Clinton to under Mr. George W. Bush and President Dick Cheney.
Abernathy can’t even claim that he remains ignorant or mistaken about the correct number because he links to Lawrence Messina’s post which does have the correct numbers.
(Strangely Abernathy does not link to my post which was the first to point out falseness of his numbers even though he awarded West Virginia Blue a “Thinking Blogger” award not so long ago.)
The only acknowledgement he obliquely makes to the numbers is:
As a follow up to yesterday’s item about the fact that the number of active duty military casualties under President Bush has not been that different than under President Clinton (Larry Messina has more up to date numbers on his blog), the chart at left serves as a reminder that Iraq is no Vietnam, or even Korea.
Abernathy is lying once again. At least now he’s inadvertantly answered the question did he intentionally lie when he originally posted the false numbers or was he simply foolish when he claimed that total military deaths under Clinton were higher than under Bush. He got busted making up the number for Bush. Now he’s trying to claim that the numbers between the two “have not been different.” That’s not the point he made in his original post and there is a huge difference in the numbers.
Abernathy can include any number of casualties from other wars. That will not change the fact that the Iraq war was unnecessary. Bush never finished the job in Afghanistan before launching his illegal war. Bush never made a compelling and honest case to the American people about the Iraq war. He lied about the intelligence in 2002 and he continues to lie about it now.
Abernathy does not even bother trying to make a case that the casualties from the Iraq war are necessary because he’s smart enough to know that case cannot be made.
So instead he tries misdirection and writes:
One can only imagine how quickly we might have abandoned World War II if the country had been subjected then to today’s liberal network newscasts, or Democrat presidential candidates who worry mostly about whether the rest of the world likes us.
Liberal network newscasts? Have you seen any of the horrific images of the war on the nightly news casts? I certainly haven’t. More network news time is devoted to the bizarre behavior of Britney Spears (a Bush supporter, by the way) than to showing footage from Iraq. In World War II, a question arose of whether the military censors should allow Life magazine to publish gruesome photos of the American dead in the aftermath of combat on a Pacific island. President Franklin D. Roosevelt told them to print it. The American people deserved to see the sacrifices that our soldiers were being called upon to make. Yet Bush has ordered that the dead returning from Iraq to Dover Air Force Base must be kept hidden from the American people and the media has complied.
So what is Abernathy really calling for, a complete news blackout from Iraq? Is he for hiding the war and hoping voters will forget what is occurring there? Because the American people turned against this war even when Fox News and other networks were acting as the administration’s cheerleaders.
The American people concluded on their own the Iraq war has not been worth the price in lives lost, soldiers maimed and money spent.
I believe that the American people would have accepted much higher casualties than the 3,600 lost in Iraq if the cause were just.
But we will never know because Bush took his eye off Afghanistan and the hunt for Osama bin Laden and diverted the vast majority of the nation’s armed might against a nation that had not attacked us on Sept. 11.
Perhaps the American people would have accepted the same level of losses as in World War II if necessary to get bin Laden when he was in Afghanistan.
We don’t know. But the majority of the American people have concluded that the lives lost in Iraq have not been worth it. Abernathy can make up any numbers he wants — but he can’t change the facts.
