They lie. They really have no choice. Reality does have a liberal bias. Therefore, the only chance Republicans have to win a debate is to lie. One of the longest running lies is that the media has a liberal bias. The result of this lie has been to make the press fear the mere accusation of bias. This has the effect of allowing liars to lie with impunity.
Today's lie is that our invasion of Iraq was a mistake based on faulty intelligence, and others, including Democrats, made the same mistake. Some on the left are faulting others on the left for charging the Wrong with manipulating the intel, when many people honestly got things wrong. Let me be clear, the Bush Administration lied, and they lied repeatedly and provably.
Let's look at just a few below the squiggle:
Perhaps the most egregious lie was about Saddam's pursuit of nuclear weapons. This claim was written into several of President Bush's speeches in the fall of 2002, and the CIA forced its retraction. In the 2003 State of the Union, President Bush stated that the British Government had intel, suggesting that Saddam's was pursuing Uranium from Niger. This was only true to the extent that the Brits had that Intel. The Bush Administration knew that it was the same intel that the CIA had debunked.
When Ambassador Joe Wilson exposed that statement for the lie that it was, Vice President Dick (appropriate, isn't it?) Cheney outed covert operative Valerie Plame. Cheney also not only said that it had been pretty well established that 9/11 terrorist Muhammed Atta met with Iraqi officials in Prague, he denied saying it!
A popular lie told now is that everyone saw the same intelligence and agreed about the threat Saddam's posed. If you watch the pundits, surrogates, and politicos at the time, they defended their positions by specifically saying the President must have better intel, and they should defer to it. It wasn't until after things went bad that defenders trotted out the line "They knew what we knew."
ISIS, or whatever you call it poses no threat to us. Sure, they have committed horrible acts. Yes, they behead people. They do this in Iraq and Syria. As horrific as those acts are, how many of those be headings are taking place in New York, Minnesota, Peoria? ISIS is using religion as an excuse to commit violence in an effort to regain Saddam's power even though Sunni's are the minority in Iraq.
The withdrawal of our troops from Iraq in 2011, was the direct result of a Status of Forces Agreement negotiated by President Bush in 2008. To blame President Obama for that withdrawal is a lie. Republicans calling the Iraq war a "mistake" are pissing on your back and telling you it's just rain.