Told ya they’d all get around to claiming they were for invading Afghanistan to get at the Taliban and al Qaeda all along, even though it’s just another politically-motivated lie — and the record belies all their nouveau-warrior “tough on terrorism” bushwa:

In a statement to The Huffington Post, MoveOn’s Executive Director Eli Pariser reacted strongly to Clinton’s remarks: “Senator Clinton has her facts wrong again. MoveOn never opposed the war in Afghanistan, and we set the record straight years ago when Karl Rove made the same claim. Senator Clinton’s attack on our members is divisive at a time when Democrats will soon need to unify to beat Senator McCain. MoveOn is 3.2 million reliable voters and volunteers who are an important part of any winning Democratic coalition in November. They deserve better than to be dismissed using Republican talking points.”

Tom Maguire has your “Republican talking points” swingin‘, and so did Byron York a goodish while back:

Some officials at the internet activist group MoveOn are denying charges made by top White House aide Karl Rove, who said in a speech to a conservative group in New York Wednesday that “In the wake of 9/11, conservatives believed it was time to unleash the might and power of the United States military against the Taliban; in the wake of 9/11 liberals believed it was time to submit a petition.” Rove continued: “I am not joking. Submitting a petition is precisely what MoveOn.org did. It was a petition imploring the powers that be to ‘use moderation and restraint in responding to the terrorist attacks against the United States.’”

After Rove’s comments, MoveOn released a statement saying flatly, “MoveOn did not oppose the U.S. military action in Afghanistan.”

It’s a bald-faced lie, and it always was. But hey, it’s what they are, it’s what they do. And they may fool some with their ever-shifting positions on the Afghanistan war and other specific issues, but they can’t fool all of us. The most telling passage from the original petition that first created the unholy union between two anti-defense liberal propaganda orgs? This:

Furthermore, we assert that the government of a nation must be presumed separate and distinct from any terrorist group that may operate within its borders, and therefore cannot be held unduly accountable for the latter’s crimes…

This moronic and Pollyannaish folderol is precisely what got us 9/11 in the first place, and it’s why Bush is failing to truly and fully prosecute the WoT now: you cannot and will not end global Islamic terrorism by going after the small-fry individual terrorists themselves, or their lower-level cells. We will never win this war — a war that was brought to us, and that we will continue to be fully engaged in and by whether we fight back or not — as long as we continue to take a kid-gloves approach to the rogue regimes without whose often-blatant support those individuals and cells could not operate on an international scale.

The faux-pacifist liberal prescription for “fighting” terrorism is one that will guarantee our ultimate defeat, just as it kept us passively vulnerable — robbed of the initiative crucial to military success, and merely responding to attacks instead of actively trying to address the real source of their offensive capability — ever since this war’s true practical origin in 1979. It’s something worse than tragic that Bush, long since brought to heel by the incessant baying of juiceless, gormless twits in support of the same failed approach they’ve been advocating for years, now in fact seems wedded to that same approach.