Letter: Republicans can’t handle the truth

Monday, Feb. 2, 2004 | 9:06 a.m.

A new urban myth is shaping up from the David Kay report. Kay says the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was an intelligence failure.

Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., says the intelligence failure is President Clinton's fault for not adequately funding the CIA in the 1990s. An e-mail myth is circulating that says the Democrats also thought Saddam was a threat. I checked that story with snopes.com to find the truth. The Democrats did say most of what was quoted in the e-mails but the statements were out of the context of their speeches and out of context in time. Most were said in 1998 during Operation Desert Fox. I found no quote where a Democrat said a pre-emptive unilateral war of occupation was a good idea.

When this new Kay/Goss myth hits the media and the e-mail circuit, the snopes response should be interesting. No one wants to believe what the evidence shows. No one wants to believe that a nice, religious and paternal man like George W. Bush would lie about a threat just to take us to war for the control of Middle East oil.

Bush is perceived to be not bright and Dick Cheney is thought to be a bit paranoid, so George Tenet must have fooled both. Bush would not start a war that to date has killed 10,000 Iraqis and more than 500 Americans just to maintain the United States as the world's only superpower. No one wants to believe that we went to war to keep European and Asian markets from becoming competitors.

Snopes tells the truth about myths, frauds and urban legends, but the Republicans can't handle the truth.

JERRY BITTS