And Speaking of Liars...
A recent poll shows that 12 out of every 3 Americans (or some other astronomically improbable number, after all, the poll was conducted by someone with an agenda) now has serious reason to doubt the veracity of one George Walker Bush. I believe the number of people who consider GW a lying sack of scattalogical matter is about 70% or so. I'm not totally sure, but as far as I can tell, the poll restricted it's scope as to whether or not the President lied about anything and everything related to the War in Iraq, the leadup to the war or the reasons for going to war.

This issue is a hot-button item for democrats (small "d" intentional), who for lack of anything better to say or do, have now taken to hopping up and down on one foot, yelling oooh-ooh, like little schoolboys bursting for a pee.

The whole issue of "did the President lie to us about Iraqi WMD's" is, of course, the fallout from the whole sordid Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson affair, which, for those of you living in caves (that means YOU, Mr. Usama BinHidin'), runs something like this:

Valerie Plame works for the CIA. Has for a very long time. It has not been a very carefully guarded secret on the Wshington Beltway cocktail circuit. Miz Plame has a husband, one Joe Wilson, career diplomat and bon-vivant, who couldn't have found gainful employment without the State Department, and who somehow (no one knows how) was enlisted by the CIA (no one knows why) to "investigate" claims that Iraq sought "yellowcake" uranium on the international market in Africa in the 1990's or something. Mr. Wilson met with his "contacts from his diplomatic days" and his "commercial contacts" and came to the conclusion that Saddam and Co. did not attempt to buy yellowcake from Niger whenever it was they are alleged to have done so.

Wilson became a celebrity when his "thorough report" was trotted out in support of John Kerry's presidential bid. Here, accoding to the conventional democratic wisdom, was a man who was infinitely qualified to comment and report on Iraq's attempt to develop nuclear weapons.

Except that he isn't. His wife is the weapons expert, and she never set foot in Africa to investigate these claims. Wilson's account, lovingly related in his book, tells all about his cordial meetings with representatives of Africa's governments and their commercial people, over mint tea, of course. Just about every Wilson interview with his contacts went something like this:

"Iraq? Yellowcake? You must be joking. Iraq never tried to buy uranium here , my friend, but you didn't hear it from me. In fact, there is no yellowcake here. A figment of someone's imagination, I suppose. Id' be shocked, shocked, if our otherwise-trustworthy-third-world shithole-African-government-types hopped into bed with a brutal dictator."

Yep. That's the people I'd go to for the truth. Diplomats. African ones, at that.

So anyway, Wilson comes home, reports there is nothing to see here, and then violates security to write a book on the whole thing, making the CNN and Oprah circuit and the whole nine yards.

The Robert Novak, a conservative columnist, somehow or other, mentions Valerie Plame, the not-so-covert-CIA agent in an article critical of Joe Wilson, and all hell breaks loose. Who revealed the name of a CIA agent to a reporter? How many reporters? How high does this go? blah, blah, blah, blah,blah.

Somehow, the Chief of Staff to Vice President Cheney is fingered as the source and the speculation is that he revealed Plame's identity to Novak, and Newsweek, and the New York Times, in an effort to shut her husband up prior to the election (Someone in the Vice President's office, Scooter Libby, violated security to identify a covert agent! How terrible! In the meantime, her husband is violating security bragging about his trip and report and dragging her int o the liight of day as he does it. Talk about double standards!) Didn't matter, as Wilson was squarely in Kerry's camp, and Kerry paid him as an advisor and financially supported Wilson's website right through the election, while Wilson was held up by democrats as the very symbol of GW Bush's problem with the truth vis-a-vis WMD.

So, anyway, this has now been blown up to epic proportions and the new democractic mantra is that "Bush is a liar", which is at least catchier than the old democratic mantra, "Bush is an idiot."

But I find it amazing, and quite amusing, to note from which quarters the "liar, liar, pants on fire" rhetoric is coming:

John Kerry - who lied about everything connected to his four months of running around Vietnam collecting self-inflicted gunshot wounds so he could be shipped home.

Teddy Kennedy - who lied about killing a woman by leaving her to drown in his car after a drunk driving accient.

Joe Biden - who is a proven prevaricator and plagerizer.

Chuck Schumer - who couldn't tell the truth if you strapped electrodes to what passes for his testicles. Schumer is a notorious exagerator, provided there's a television camera somewhere in the vicinity t exagerat to.

Bill/Hillary Clinton - need I say more? I guess it depends on what the definition of "lie" is.

Jimmy Carter - notorious traitor and certifier of third-world pisspot elections in which ballots are filled in under the barrel of a gun, but somehow magically cleansed by his imprimitur.

Robert W. Byrd - former Klansman and defender of civil rights, who it seems has been senator from West Virgina ever since there was a West Virginia.

John Edwards - a lawyer, former Senator from North Carolina and John Kerry's water boy in 2004. That says it all. Yep, when I need to identify a liar, I always trust the word of a lawyer.

This is just the A-list.

As far as I can recall, the intelligence regarding Iraqi WMD's was pretty clear, if only later proven incorrect. It was such a common belief that Iraq had the capability of producing a nuc that every Western European intelligence agency all agreed with the CIA's estimate (not Wilson/Plame, the real CIA). In other words, everyone was fooled.

But of course, there were other reasons given for the invasion of Iraq: Saddam Hussein had to go, it was US policy thatthe Iraqi regime should be changed (by force, if necessary) since 1998 (Teddy, Johnny, Robby, and Joey all voted for that resolution, by the way). We won't even get into the terms of the Armistice which ended the First Gulf War (repeatedly violated by Saddam) and 17 U.N. Resolutions concerning Iraq's conduct, sanctions and weapons programs.

Then there was the 64 pages in the 9/11 Commission Report which detailed Iraqi contacts with Al-Qeada and other terrorist networks, the training camps within Iraq, etc.

What's being done here is that the entire case for going to war is being chucked, or conveniently forgotten, to advance the premise that Bush lied about WMD's and that this "lie" negates the rest of the argument, and thus, the justification for war. But this is a tricky thing to do: after all, the intelligence was dead wrong. If a president makes a decision based on bad information that isn't proven bad until after the fact, did he actually lie?

The answer, of course, is no. Only democrats want you to believe otherwise. They also want to be in that wonderful, fabulous position we'd all love to be in, which is the position in which you can have your cake and eat it too. Democratic support for the Iraq war was pure political opportunism --- many democrats paid for their "No War" vote in 1991 with the loss of their office in 1994 --- and no democrat was going to make the same mistake this time around. The majority of them voted to go to war in 2002. Which is too bad from the perspective of what it has cost them: the rabid fringes of their own party has savaged them terribly and there exists a true possibility of a split on the far left of the party. The same far left that punked out on Al Gore in favor of Ralph Nader and gave Bush the election in 2000. They now want to, on the one hand, justify their "YES" vote on the war to the "moderates" (Reagan Democrats, who actually think like republicans) in the party, and at the same time explain why they couldn't cast a "NO" vote to their rabid dogs.

It's all so simple: Bush lied to us! Had WE been in charge or had WE known he was lying, this would never have happened! They expect you to believe that they are that dumb to be tricked into something like this by a man thay have called an idiot for five years. What does that say about them?

Don't buy it. Anyone who believes this nonsense would also be willing to take the word of a corrupt African diplomat on a nuclear non-proliferation.