May Be Easiest Rove Lie To Disprove Ever
White House Website from Sept. 2002: 'President Urges Congress to Pass Iraq Resolution Promptly'
By Jon Ponder on 11/28/2007, 3:45pm PT  

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

First some ancient history: In the fall of 2002, the Bush administration was preoccupied with ramming its Iraq war resolution through Congress. It wasn't that they needed the resolution to go to war. Not hardly.

What the Bush team wanted was to get the Congress on the record about the war before the midterm elections that November --- in particular the resolution was intended to cause a rift between bloodthirsty voters back home and antiwar Democrats in the House. They also hoped to use votes for the resolution by Democratic senators who might run against Bush in 2004, including Sens. Kerry, Clinton, Edwards, and Lieberman, to name a few, as a wedge issue to separate them from their liberal base.

The war resolution was part of a "marketing campaign," as Andy Card, the White House chief of staff, referred to it, that had been put together by the Iraq Study Group, an elite corps inside the West Wing that included, among others, Karl Rove.

Last Wednesday, a mere five years after helping ram the war resolution through Congress, Karl Rove went on Charlie Rose and rewrote history as brazenly as it has ever been done:

ROVE: One of the untold stories about the war is why did the United States Congress, the United States Senate vote on the war resolution in the fall of 2002?

CHARLIE ROSE, HOST: Why?

ROVE: This administration was opposed to it. I‘m going to talk about that in my book.

ROSE: Well, tell me.

ROVE: No.

ROSE: Come on, give me something.

ROVE: No.

ROSE: Give me something.

ROVE: I just did. I told you the administration was opposed to voting on it in the Fall of 2002.

ROSE: Because?

ROVE: Because, we didn‘t think it belonged within the confines of the election. There was an election coming up in a matter of weeks. We thought it made it too political. We wanted it outside the confines of it. It seemed to make things move too fast. There were things that needed to be done to bring along allies and potential allies abroad.

This may not be the biggest lie Rove has ever told but it certainly the easiest to disprove. There must be hundreds, if not thousands, of contemporaneous news accounts of the White House pressuring Congress to pass the war resolution in the fall of 2002.

But, as Keith Olbermann pointed out last night, there's a source that disproves Rove that even he would have trouble discrediting: The White House website at whitehouse.gov.

A quick search produces a transcript for a briefing by Bush on Sept. 24, 2002, which someone on Bush's staff titled:

"President Urges Congress to Pass Iraq Resolution Promptly."

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Article Categories: Karl Rove, Accountability