FEBRUARY 9, 2004 – There is a great divide in our country among those who support the President viscously and those who can’t begin to imagine how anyone could support the man. And many people on both sides of things are not truly aware of why this is the case.

Well, here below is another illustration of the misleading, partisan propaganda that circulates in order to feed the hatred on one side, getting them to inaccurately and dishonestly blame the other side for something their side is responsible for.

Now, you have to realize first that just as important to the right-wing blame-and-lie machine as talk radio is another tool many don’t even consider – forwarded propaganda e-mails. This may not sound like a serious thing, but here is the reality: every day, one or two or three e-mails like the one you see below are forwarded among these Bush/Limbaugh Republicans, and they take these more seriously than anything they read in the news or hear anywhere else. Indeed, many of these claim to be correcting the "liberal" bias they claim the media has.

The group that circulates these e-mails are the most ardent and influential in the country – top business executives and other mainly white collar Bushies with lots of cash. They are, in essence, the white male base that he depends on to keep his hold on power.

The whole point of the exercise, once again, is for the Bush/Limbaugh blame-and-lie machine to be able to get their propaganda out unfiltered (in fact, the President recently complained about the media "filter") and unrebutted. They don’t want fact checkers, they don’t want a free and open debate, as is the American way, but one-sided, Soviet Union-like propaganda.

So here, as an example, is one e-mail in this constant flow of lying spin.

To start, let’s look at the first half of it:

So there you have the first part of this e-mail. Sounds pretty damning of Al Gore, doesn’t it? Remember how President Bush promised to usher in a "new era of responsibility?" Well, here again we see how desperately he and his supporters are determined to maintain their streak of never taking responsibility for anything.

For you history buffs out there, what basic, underlying fact is left out of this e-mail in order to put the onus of guilt on a Senator from Tennessee rather than, say, the President and Vice President at the time, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush?

Read the story. You see poor Al has no idea who Osama is. In fact, as the e-mail admits, "At this point the senator tried to repeat the name, but couldn't pronounce it, which most people back then probably couldn't." That’s right, nobody back then – not even Senators – had any idea who Osama bin Laden was.

Now to the million dollar – or say, three thousand life – question: why, exactly, way back in 1987, did a man named Oliver North not only know Osama bin Laden so well but have to fear for his life from the man?

Oh yeah, they ignore that most basic part of the story. Al Gore is supposed to be the bad guy because he didn't realize what a threat Osama was back then, but in reality, Osama had only just become a threat because of the policies which were being dictated by Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush which were being carried out by men like Oliver North.

In fact, Oliver North was called to testify for being involved in exactly the sort of covert operations through which Reagan/Bush funded, armed, and trained Osama and his al-Queda "freedom fighters" (as they were called by the administration back then) to begin with.

The damning fact in the above information is not that Al Gore didn’t know Osama – that is actually a good sign for Al. In fact, it is clear evidence that Al Gore was in no way responsible for or involved with the activities that were building Osama into the powerful monster he became. By the time Oliver North, Reagan, and Bush had created such a mess that Olie was fearing for his and his family’s lives, Al Gore didn’t even know Osama from Adam.

What is made clear in the above testimony is that Oliver North had done something to earn the wrath – personally – of Osama bin Laden as far back as 1987. Olie wasn’t worried about some terrorist threat against the nation, he was worried about Osama coming after his family personally.

So in fact, what we see above is that Oliver North in particular – and for certain the administration whose policies he was carrying out – were directly responsible for incurring Osama’s antipathy toward us – the hatred that would, down the road, lead him to attack the Twin Towers and Pentagon on September 11.

We often say at The Moderate Independent that the difference between the Bush/Limbaughians and the rest of us is that they don’t have – nor want – all the facts. Quite simply, they don’t want, and in fact can’t handle, the truth. They avoid it like the plague, condemn it, label anything or anyone who reports truth "liberal," "commie," "unpatriotic," etc.

E-mails like the one above are a central tool they use to help maintain their hateful, misinformed following.

There’s more, but before continuing let me just point out that I didn’t bother to check if the information provided in the e-mail about Oliver North’s testimony is even accurate to begin. The reality is, as it was when we debunked Rush Limbaugh’s tax numbers, that even if it is, this is stuff that they are claiming damns Gore and shows Olie as hero, when, even taken as they present it, it truly shows exactly the opposite.

So now to the second part of the e-mail:

Now, all of this may be factually accurate or not – we won’t bother to check – because the important thing that you see here is a clearly pathetic, desperate attempt for the Bushies to, yet again, try to blame someone else for what is happening on their watch. The horrible economy, that was Clinton’s fault, even though he presided over prosperity and Bush has presided over recession. And 9/11, they try to blame Clinton, in this case for getting Mohammed Atta released from prison in 1993.

The same people who condemn Clinton for this give President Bush a free pass on letting Atta enter the country before 9/11, even though he was a suspected terrorist under surveillance by our intelligence agencies.

Hmm, letting someone be released into the West Bank as part of a peace deal or letting someone into the USA to blow up the Twin Towers – which is worse in your book?

They also give President Bush a free pass for not taking seriously enough the Osama threat or taking any action in his first nine months in office, for not coordinating intelligence which could have prevented 9/11, and for, in fact, not using the information gotten from one of the would-be 9/11 bombers who was arrested here, in America, just months before they hijackers went on to fly an airplane into the Twin Towers.

Let’s look at these facts once again:

In 1993, Clinton was involved in getting Mohammed Atta released. For this, they condemn him.

On August 16, 2001, Zacarias Moussaoui was arrested by FBI agents in Minnesota, USA, after agents grew suspicious that he was attending a flight school and only learning to fly mid-flight, not to take off or land. One agent "mentioned the possibility of Moussaoui being that type of person that could fly something into the World Trade Center." (see CNN article) On August 26, the FBI was told by France that Moussaoui had ties to al-Queda. And yet, on President Bush’s watch, Moussaoui was not charged. But the Bush/Limbaughians don’t blame him for this.

Furthermore, the investigation of Moussaoui led to a flight school in Oklahoma where, as it turns out, a number of the soon-to-be September 11 hijackers had been training, and it was the same school that Abdul Hakim Murad – a man who had confessed to be an al-Queda operative and admitted having planned to fly a plane into the CIA – had trained (Murad had testified about these plans at the 1996 trial of Ramzi Yusef, the man who organized the first World Trader Center bombing.) And still, on George Bush’s watch, nothing was done, as focus remained on tax cuts and trying to get rights to drill in the Arctic Wildlife Preserve.

Wait, what about Mohammed Atta? Clinton is, according to the Bushies, responsible because he helped get Atta released in 1993, but it doesn’t bother them that, despite the fact that Mohammed Atta was a suspected terrorist and under direct surveillance by our intelligence agencies, he was allowed to enter the country to carry out the September 11 attacks.

So in the first part of this typical, daily Bush/Limbaughian e-mail, they present the usual misleading half truths, claiming that the facts most people don’t consider show Al Gore is somehow responsible for 9/11, when if fact when you look at the actual facts the evidence they show proves exactly the opposite.

Then in the second part, they display their absolute determination never to take responsibility for anything by trying to nail Clinton for – almost a decade before September 11 – getting Atta released to the West Bank as part of peace accord, trying desperately to divert attention from, on their favorite President’s watch, Atta being let into the country in 2001, despite being a suspected terrorist under surveillance, and despite an unfocused, improperly alerted and prioritized intelligence community which, again under President Bush’s watch, let information that could have prevented 9/11 from occurring go unacted upon.

Wait, there is a third part to this e-mail, and indeed, it may be the most telling:

There it is, the "those people out there don’t have the real information, because of the ‘liberal press,’ and that is why they are so stupid and don’t support President Bush," sales pitch that is the only thing that allows President Bush to stay in power.

We at M/I don’t know if President Bush was AWOL from duty during his time in the National Guard or not, but it seems like if he was there he would have learned a simple rule: that you are responsible for what happens on your watch. And the pathetic Bush/Limbaughians who exist in their own chop-logic and half-fact world are sadly, weakly unable to admit that their man screwed up. And so they continue to embarrass themselves with desperate attempts to throw smoke and mirrors in front of the obvious, basic reality: that Reagan and the first Bush built Osama into the problem he was and burned him badly enough to turn him against us, and the younger Bush then failed to deal with the mess left by his father adequately and let 9/11 happen on his watch.