Abu Wabu

On the same day that the idiots are all breathless (how I wish it were so) about Iraqi newspapers printing positive stories about life in post-Saddam Iraq, the troop-hating weasels at MoveOn are once again exposed as soulless, whining liars.

That's the left's overwhelming response to Joe Lieberman making sense and supporting President Bush on Iraq. But that unbridled hatred for any success in Iraq, or the larger war against Islamofascism, is these assholes' stock in trade. They hate America, they hate western society, and they're losing.



WASHINGTON (Hartford Courant) -- Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, just back from Iraq, wants President Bush to give the American people details about the progress being made in that country - from military triumphs to the proliferation of cellphones and satellite dishes.

Bush is scheduled to give the nation a progress report on Iraq Wednesday, his first such address since Congress erupted two weeks ago in bitter debate over the war.

Supporters and critics alike have been urging the president to outline his strategy for some time.

...Lieberman, D-Conn., who spent Wednesday and Thursday in Iraq, saw strong evidence that a workable American plan is in place.

"We do have a strategy," he said. "We do have a plan. I saw a strategy that's being implemented."

Lieberman, who is one of Bush's strongest war supporters in the Senate, cited the remarks of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who last month told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the strategy in Iraq was to "clear, hold and build: to clear areas from insurgent control, to hold them securely and to build durable, national Iraqi institutions."

To the DUhllards, that's just plain eeevil.

Thanks to Wizbang

Here's John Kerry commenting on Bush's speech to the Naval Academy:
"Every troop I've met in Iraq comes up to me and says, 'Thanks for speaking out on this.'"

ABP answers:
Um, not quite. I know one that didn't. His name is Captain David Rozelle, author of the inspiring book Back In Action. In the book Rozelle, who was returning to America after having his foot amputated because of a roadside bomb in Iraq laid by terrorists, recounts his meeting with John Kerry who also happened to be on the airplane home. Kerry said, "I don't support the war, but I appreciate your service".

As you know if you read the book, that comment did not sit well with Captain Rozelle (who is now back commanding troops in Iraq with an artificial foot), who did not speak with Kerry the rest of the flight, and most certainly did not thank him for "speaking out".

John F'n Kerry is still lying about American troops forty years after first slandering them.

Kerry's new lies are, to be fair, nuanced: after returning from Vietnam, he slandered the morality of conscripted U.S. troops there trying to do their job there and then get home, accusing those young men and women of all manner of war crimes. This time around, he only lies about their success, morale and resolve. Oh yes, and their leadership.

That's not to say he doesn't lie about anything else; in fact, John F'n Kerry lies about so many things that it's hard to keep up.

The Corner has a possible explanation for Kerry's statement, to which Rich Lowry has added an observation. And here are excerpts from soldiers' e-mails to Jonah Goldberg.

Paul Martin's Liberals were defeated in a non-confidence motion in Parliament. Now comes the election, and with it, The Official Blog Of The Liberal Party Of Canada.

An excerpt in English:

November 29th - Day One
7:41 PM - We're on the bus to Montreal after the first rally of the campaign. The PM just gave a speech at a lounge in Ottawa's Byward Market. Critically, no animals were harmed.
People keep sayng this campaign is a carbon copy of the 2004 election. But that's not true. Stephen Harper has a right handsome new hairstyle. Paul Hellyer has grabbed hold of the campaign agenda, blowing the lid off the whole UFO invasion thing, the number one priority of Canadians who are socially awkward Omni subscribers. And we were all shocked to walk out tonight to discover that, unlike 2004, the PM's oversized face is not on the side of the side of our campaign bus.
Turns out this was an edict from the Prime Minister himself. Big Paul (as we called the massive head, which featured the PM in a boyish haircut and a relentless, toothy smile that we all grew to pathelogically detest) was apparently cramping his style. And frightening small children. We'd pull into small towns in Quebec and we'd invariably hear the frightened screams of innocent toddlers: "Le nez! Le nez!"
Now the side of the bus reads simply: "Paul Martin's Liberals." And Big Paul has gone to his eternal resting spot, which I just naturally assume is the PM's bedroom.

Also:
Now we're talking about speeches: the PM apparently wants to give some. He's completely resisting my strong advice that he express his vision for the country through interpretive dance.

More from this freak show as it happens, although I fully expect an adult to take over fairly soon and put an end to the fun.

This from the Quebec side of the Liberal Party blog:
Throughout the countryside, Scott Feschuk, principal writer of the speeches of Paul Martin, will send, on line round, short anecdotes starting from its Blackberry. It is an apparatus without wire which makes it possible to the political collaborators to remain in contact between them, to communicate instantaneously with the media and to develop so muscular inches which they can fold a part of five hundreds into four! To react to the blog of Scott, click on sfeschuk@liberal.ca. (Translation by Babel Fish Translation)

And yet this may be the most important federal election in Canada's history.

Blogs For Bush asked, "Should The President Conduct 'Fireside Chats' On Iraq?" A great question. I followed the link to FDR's fireside chats and found a monument to a nation's character, and a voice from history speaking to what we face today.

FDR On the Declaration of War with Japan

Cindy She-Hen's book signing. A harbinger of the antiwar idiot's future in America.

Good.

Iraqi Red Crescent thanks U.S. with $1 million for Katrina relief:

Iraq's Red Crescent relief organization found its own way to mark the Thanksgiving holiday yesterday by announcing that it had sent a $1 million "thank you" donation to the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

The sum, transferred by wire on Sunday, amounts to 20 percent of the organization's annual budget.

"I wish we could have a billion dollars to give," Said Hakki, the organization's president, said by telephone from Baghdad. "Even then, it is not enough to show our appreciation for what the U.S. has done for Iraq and is still doing."

The donation was made with the approval of the office of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and is thought to mark the first time that Iraq has sent aid to the United States.

Haydar al-Abadi, a senior adviser to the prime minister, said in a separate telephone interview that he was worried that the gesture -- though noble -- could prompt complaints that the money should have been spent on the country's own emergencies.

But Mr. Hakki was adamant.

"Giving thanks is an Iraqi tradition as well as an American one. This is the minimum we could do after the Americans shed their blood in our country, mixing their blood with ours," he said.

He said the overthrow of dictator Saddam Hussein was "a blessing from God, and the U.S. was His tool."

Mr. Hakki left his job as a urology professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa last year to take charge of his country's massive -- and often lethally dangerous -- relief operations.

Remember this photo that appeared on the CNN and Netscape websites with the filename "asshole.jpg"? And remember how more such rancor was exposed? And remember how CNN blamed Netscape, who blamed it on some goat they subsequently fired?

Okay, keep that in mind while Bill Quick of Daily Pundit examines the latest occurance of Bush Derangement Syndrome at CNN.

My first reaction to this story was that, while interesting, none of it is any big deal, but I've changed my mind and have concluded that it is a big deal. It's a big deal because CNN is a Big Player and should have what's left of its corporate nuts kicked for allowing the infiltration of its ranks by so many Bush-hating wackos. Antiwar idiots will surely challenge that assertion, as this post deals with a mere three incidents of BDS at only one news organization. But to those DUhllards and Koswits who see a Jeff Gannon manwhore secret agent behind every door to the Oval Office and an Eeeevil Cabal behind every scary Neo-con, I have to say that we have a definite trend happening here. This sort of thing doesn't happen without a friendly environment in which to incubate, which certainly seems to be the case behind the scenes at CNN, despite management's move to define a bad editorial decision as "technical mess-up not an editorial decision".

And that doesn't even take into account the constant stream of on-air garbage that CNN passes off as journalism.



The interesting and, for my money, the most positive thing about Bush Derangement Syndrome is how it attacks a news organization's nervous system once it has gained a foothold on the host. A short list of casualties, some of whom still soldier on despite having been grossly debilitated:
Dan Rather
Mary Mapes
Eason Jordan
Jack Kafferty
Judy Woodruff
Wolf Blitzer
Alan Colmes
Bill Moyers
Arianna Huffington
Aaron Brown
Judy Miller
Chris Matthews
Walter Cronkite
Maureen Dowd
Michael Isikoff
Stuart Smalley
Nicholas Kristof
Paul Krugman
Seymour Hirsch (to be fair, already stricken with something prior to infection)
Reuters
AP
AFP
CBS
NPR
NBC
ABC
BBC
CBC
NYT
LAT
WAPO

Bush Derangement Syndrome continues to plow through the ranks of the MSM like a gigantic Chinese industrial spill, and CNN appears to be among the hardest hit.

UPDATE:
Some final thoughts from Bill Quick on the differences between MSM and blog reportage.

I have to my great reward traded correspondence with a U.S. Marine Sergeant these past few months. He leaves his theater of operation in a few weeks to return to the United States and is going to marry his fiancee, who has stuck by her guy through thick and thin. I don't know his age, colour, politics or shoe size, but he and his gal are young people just beginning their lives together. I love this guy and his crew and I admire his bride-to-be, who can be very proud of her groom.

Go get your life, folks.

"After being notified of the situation and after researching the matter ... I came to the conclusion that I was not drafted by the A's":

Bill Richardson, governor of New Mexico and former Clinton administration guy who just now figured out he was never drafted by a pro baseball team. -- 40 years after he first started putting it on his resume.

And Bill is married, by the way, to Morgan Fairchild.

How completely and utterly embarrassing. End of the career? No way. But it will always be with him, like Chappaquiddick on Tedly, except no-one drowned. Big upside, that.

Captain's Quarters:
The Admiral Emeritus once told me that the definition of disillusionment was watching your martial-arts instructor get his ass kicked in a country-western bar. Having one's commander surrender to the enemy when he and his ilk have sent dozens to kill themselves just to take out a few women and children in buses and pizzerias has to come in at least a close second on that scale. I wonder what Abu Rob's cohorts think of his sacrifice for the cause tonight.

And what about the antiwar idiots?

In his Weekly Standard article The Naysayer, Thomas Joscelyn compares historical fact to former NSC worker Daniel Benjamin's incredible story that there were no AQ-Iraq ties. Benjamin, who wrote in Time Mag that "there was no pre-existing relationship between Baghdad and al-Qaeda," yada yada yada, last week in Slate accused Vice President Dick Cheney of "cherry-picking" intelligence with his dirty neocon pals. Good one. Benji's problem is that the public, Joscelyn among them, has access to certain pre-war intelligence, often secretly referred to as news archives, common knowledge, and other such intentionally misleading codenames. The result is that a select few know Benji is gearing us around:

...if one is looking for an exemplary cherry-picker, then there is none better than Benjamin himself. Benjamin has gone out of his way to advance the most logically tortuous reasons for dismissing evidence of a relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda. In so doing, he has demonstrated the absurd lengths to which some will carry their wrongheaded assumptions.

Funny how all that intel so widely published during the Clinton years about the ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda has been forgotten by antiwar idiots, who only listened to the "We have Saddam inside a box" nonsense because it gave such comfort: why do anything to/about a guy we "have in a box"?

Well, he wasn't in a box: he was filling mass graves with his own people after murdering them with chemical weapons or feeding them feet-first into industrial shredders or executing them in front of their families, he was evading weapons inspectors and bribing the French, Germans, Russians and the U.N. with petrodollars to look the other way, he was plotting to assassinate the President of the United States, he was firing missiles at warplanes protecting his own people from him in UN-sanctioned no-fly zones, and preparing to restart his weapons programs as soon as the sanctions against him collapsed. And, of course, he was working with terrorists who sought weapons of mass destruction.

That's pretty much your antiwar idiot's idea of "Saddam Is In A Box."

Compare that to George W. Bush's idea of Saddam in a box:



No ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda here, and Saddam's in a box. Thank you, Mr. President.

Here.

Would that all Democrats and more than a few Republicans were as honest as Senator Joseph Lieberman. Man I like this guy.

Scott Johnson: "It's great to hear from John O'Neill again."

Swift Boat Veteran John O'Neill is holding John Kerry to account once more, this time for declaring that he, Kerry, "won't stand for the Swift-Boating of Jack Murtha!"

O'Neill's answer:

"As one of the 254 members of Mr. Kerry's unit in Vietnam who belonged to Swift Boat Veterans and POWs for Truth, I found Mr. Kerry's comments most ironic.

"To us, Mr. Kerry's comments meant that no one should do to Mr. Murtha that which Mr. Kerry did to all of us and our fellow Vietnam veterans, living and dead. Mr. Kerry's disgraceful comments on many occasions in 1971 (while we were locked in combat), claiming falsely that we were "murdering" hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and committing rape and mayhem on a daily basis, are a part of the public record for which he has never apologized. This might be called 'Kerrying' our soldiers."

Affirmative.

NRO's Mackubin Thomas Owens tells us "Why Jack Murtha is wrong".

Quote:
In 1990, North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap, confirming what he has written in his own memoirs, told Stanley Karnow that "We were not strong enough to drive out a half-million American troops, but that wasn't our aim. Our intention was to break the will of the American government to continue the war."

Surely this is some sort of hoax, what with it being in the middle of the night: Drudge shows a still from CNN's live broadcast of Vice-President Cheney's speech with a black "x" overlaying the TV image. Drudge reports that "The 'X' over Cheney's face appeared each time less than a second, creating an odd subliminal effect". The "X" image was accompanied by some obvious but indecipherable black lettering below. One of the last words appears to be "black".

The White House is curious. More later.

UPDATE:
The White House is no longer curious.

I'm more interested in Cheney's speech. Read it or you're not doing your homework.

Quote:
As the prime target of terrorists who have shown an ability to hit America and who wish to do so in spectacular fashion, we have a responsibility to do everything we can to keep terrible weapons out of the hands of these enemies.
And we must hold to account regimes that could supply those weapons to terrorists in defiance of the civilized world.
As the president has said, terrorists and terror states do not reveal threats with fair notice, in formal declarations. And responding to such enemies only after they have struck first is not self-defense, it is suicide.

Maybe he thought that if he went to the Great White North to spout sophisticated, no, nuanced pro-terror, anti-American garbage, no-one would find out about it.

"If we stop trying to figure out the other side, we've given up. The person on the other side is not evil -- they just have a different perspective."

Here's Chris Matthews' idea of working from a different perspective:



If Chris Matthews is still trying to figure out the other side, maybe it's time for Chris Matthews to shut up. Because it certainly isn't hard to figure out Chris Matthews.

Our infamous leftist brothers and sisters have been especially unkind to Michelle Malkin. In fact they have been vile, mysoginistic, sadistic and racist, as has been Ann Coulter's experience. Now Michelle has drawn the line and demanded decorum from all those nuanced leftist mouth-breathers.

Saddam took a beating for insulting holy men of Islam.

Good.

So sayeth Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, recounting a phonecall she received from a Marine colonel in Iraq in response to Rep. John Murtha's demand yesterday that the U.S. withdraw its forces from Iraq forthwith, a song Murtha has sung before, and which he likes to portray upon every recital as if he has just reached some sort of epiphany. The colonel's comment, delivered during a debate in the House over the question of withdrawal for which the Dems and other antiwar idiots have so fervently campaigned, drew boos from the Democrats, who apparently will even turn on American field commanders in the theater of battle if their reality-based assessments don't jive with the cut-and-run crowd slandering their accomplishments. And so it has come to this, that the Democrats are now shopping for political gain on the backs of the men and women serving and sacrificing in Iraq.

Now Murtha's meanderings have wrought real consequences in the form of an up-or-down Senate vote on Murtha's demands. Answer: 403 to 3 against pulling the troops. Unlike the Iraqis they would abandon to Zarqawi and Al Qaeda, the Democrats don't want to be tested by a vote.

Fucking phonies... the House Dems and their leftist idiot supporters are shallow, treacherous, opportunistic liars. Watch the Dems try to carry on as if everyone still believes their Bush Lied trash. And they'll all leave Murtha twisting in the wind as they try to portray themselves as more moderate than Murtha on a timetable for withdrawal. No matter- they're still just a bunch of lying, prevaricating, mealymouthed cowards.

UPDATE:
I missed this terse observation from Ed Morrissey:
Cutting and running is surrender, no matter who proposes it. I don't care if Murtha has a chest full of medals -- telling the national media that American troops can't handle Islamofascist terrorists and must be withdrawn from their range of action is cowardice.

Read it all.

Former FBI Director Louis Freeh has some harsh criticisms of the 9/11 Commission's mishandling of Able Danger, including Commission member Jamie Gorelick's conflict of interest as the architect of the infamous Wall that prevented the sharing with the FBI of Able Danger's information on the 9/11 highjackers prior to the attacks.



"So What?", asks Andrew McCarthy on the latest Andrew Sullivan "filled with heartache at such gobsmacking vileness" torture fever:

In the history of American wars, we have always taken prisoners. Most of them have unremarkably been held without charge since the point of holding them is not to charge them but to prevent them from rejoining the war. They have unremarkably been held without a definite date for the concusion of their detention because, at the time of capture, we don't know when wars will end (a German soldier taken prisoner in 1942 had no idea whether the Second World War would end in 1943, 1945, 1955 or any time in between). Why that state of affairs should suddenly, in this war, be deemed some kind of monumental abuse is mystifying.

As are most of Andrew Sullivan's hysterical girlyfits. Or so I understand.



Victor Davis Hansen points out the intellectually dishonest and morally reprehensible nature of the Bush Lied lies coming from the left.



Speaking of intellectually dishonest and morally reprehensible, John F'n Kerry serves as a reminder to those of us who can recall Great Lies Of The Past in this historic address to West Point by WFB.



The Democrats' Plan for Iraq, at least prior to tonight's vote:
















(Photoshop stolen from Little Green Footballs)



Meanwhile, Frank J. has the story on Light Blogging At InstaPundit

No problem; the lies about targeting civilians are of the sort we're all used to by now from the left.

If it took white phosphorus to kill an enemy, so be it. Some get chopped up by machinegun fire from helicopters; some eat a five-hundred-pound laser-guided MoFo (Knock, knock. Who's there? Ka. Ka who? Ka-boom!) some get it up close, hand to hand. It doesn't matter how you make the guy dead; what matters is that he's gone and can no longer affect your plans.

That's how you win at war; you prevail over the enemy. If only white-hot fire affects his behaviour, then white-hot fire he shall have. You must meet that measure.

Or you can surrender like a Democrat.

Captain Ed has a story, a very interesting story:

Woodward was Plame before Plame was cool.

"Now it looks like in those two years, it never occurred to Fitzgerald to check with other journalists to see if they had heard of Plame and her association with the CIA."

Gee, whaddya know: Saddam Hussein had the materials for a nuclear weapon.

Shut uuup! Reeelly?

I can see it now over at Koz' place: "Bush Plants 'Cake on Saddam".

Meanwhile, SecDef: Raaaarrr!

President Bush will speak this evening at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska.

Among his remarks:
Reasonable people can disagree about the conduct of the war –­ but it is irresponsible for Democrats to now claim that we misled them and the American people. Leaders in my Administration and members of Congress from both parties looked at the same intelligence on Iraq –­ and reached the conclusion that Saddam Hussein was a threat. Let me give you quotes from three senior Democrats: First, quote, “There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons.” End quote. Here’s another one, quote, “The war against terrorism will not be finished as long as [Saddam Hussein] is in power.” End quote. And here’s the way another Democratic leader summed it up, quote, “Saddam Hussein, in effect, has thumbed his nose at the world community. And I think that the President's approaching this in the right fashion.”

The truth is that investigations of the intelligence on Iraq have concluded that only one person manipulated evidence and misled the world –­ and that person was Saddam Hussein. In early 2004, when weapons inspector David Kay testified that he had not found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he also testified that, quote, “Iraq was in clear material violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1441. They maintained programs and activities, and they certainly had the intentions at a point to resume their programs. So there was a lot they wanted to hide because it showed what they were doing that was illegal.” Eight months later, weapons inspector Charles Duelfer issued a report that found, quote, “Saddam Hussein so dominated the Iraqi Regime that its strategic intent was his alone. He wanted to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction when sanctions were lifted.”

Some of our elected leaders have opposed this war all along. I disagree with them, but I respect their willingness to take a consistent stand. Yet some Democrats who voted to authorize the use of force are now rewriting the past. They are playing politics with this issue and sending mixed signals to our troops and the enemy. That is irresponsible.

As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them. Our troops deserve to know that this support will remain firm when the going gets tough. And our troops deserve to know that whatever our differences in Washington, our will is strong, our nation is united, and we will settle for nothing less than victory.

The left is accusing Bush of treason. They are lying and Bush must hammer that home. The best way to do that is to give voice to the people volunteering to go into harm's way and challenge the ungrateful to fault their work and dedication and results.

How's about because she's a miserable coot?

I mean, just look into those cold, dead eyes, if you dare. We're talkin' Medusa here.

Are you turned on?



Me neither.

MoDo, you ask "Are Men Necessary"; try "What Man Wants A Miserable Coot For A Girlfriend?"

Yikes!

NRO's Rich Lowry, sitting in for the eeevil Sean Hannity on Fox's Hannity and Colmes, set Alan Colmes' nostrils aflare last week when he joked what a sucker the Oil-For-Food scandal had made of Colmes: "Here you were against the war in Iraq, and you never even got a contract from Saddam."

Now Lowry points out the suckers in the Democratic leadership who, if their claims are true, have a lot of 'splaining to do about their collective gullibility, because "We were all fooled" sure as heck isn't a compelling slogan for the 2006 election.

Still, you've just got to know these idiots are going to give it the old college try.

Karl Rove lays down the law at The Federalist Society.

Finally, President Bush responds to Harry Reid and the rest of the lying bastards who are now attemping to set the stage for an impeachment.

I think Bush's answer to the impeachment crowd will be the same as it was for the terrorists: bring it on. If this goes where the Democrats appear to want it to go, the whole lot of them will be made to look like a bunch of blithering idiots. I can't ask for more than that.

Bad Hair Blog poses and answers an interesting question backed by maps showing the extent of damage done by Islamic rioters and pillagers, er, that is to say, uh, youths, in France.

I'll say this for her: Mary Mapes has a demonstrated tendency to soil her pants when called to account for her "journalism". Not satisfied with becoming a poster-child for Bush Derangement Syndrome and studied self-embarrassment, she writes a book that in its course accuses anonymous rightwing bloggers of attacking her, and names Karl Rove as "the mastermind of the Republican attack against the story." Wowee. This approach compounds her problem: she has to promote her book in the media and appear in interviews, but, as with the blogosphere's takedown of the whole sorry mess she created, she seems totally unprepared for any thinking person to challenge her credibility. Blitzer and O'Rielly both pointed out to her that, given the timing of the Bush/TANG story's release so close to the presidential election, she therefore bore the burden to prove it rather than irresponsibly leaving it up to someone out there to disprove it. Her answers show that she remains almost somnambulistic on this point.

This is why I enjoy Ace Of Spades.

MORE:
Michelle Malkin
Power Line
Emily Will

That's all.

RealClearPolitics' Tom Bevan notes a boilerplate girly-patting of Norm Podhoretz' tour-de-force as he wraps up the argument for action on Iraq:

In the end, the story of the run-up to the Iraq war is about intelligence, but not in the way most people think. Intelligence is always flawed and imprecise, even more so when you're dealing with a closed, paranoid and authoritarian regime like Hussein's. It's foolish to suggest Bush should have bucked consensus estimates on Iraq WMD built from more than a decade of intel, and it's even worse to suggest he lied for not doing so.

What President Bush did instead was put an end to the decade-long guessing game and place the burden squarely on Saddam Hussein by saying in front of the world: "This is what we think you have. It's now your responsibility to prove us wrong." In the aftermath of the worst terrorist attack in the history of America, it was absolutely the right thing to do.

Unless you're an idiot, in which case you should go here and read the comments, 'cause you'll love 'em. No-one need insult these fools; they do well enough on their own.

Also, note Rick Moran's American Thinker article on the CIA's campaign against George W. Bush. Come on, Porter Goss, let's purge the organization.

Few who should read this will, which is what makes them leftist idiots, but Norman Podhoretz has written a typically elegant expose that demolishes the 'Bush Lied' story once and for all time. Thanks to the author, there is no longer an excuse to be an idiot, at least not on this matter:

Among the many distortions, misrepresentations, and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral and/or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed.

What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up, or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon characters, this allegation simply cannot be killed off, no matter what.

Nevertheless, I want to take one more shot at exposing it for the lie that it itself really is. Although doing so will require going over ground that I and many others have covered before, I hope that revisiting this well-trodden terrain may also serve to refresh memories that have grown dim, to clarify thoughts that have grown confused, and to revive outrage that has grown commensurately dulled.

The main “lie” that George W. Bush is accused of telling us is that Saddam Hussein possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, or WMD as they have invariably come to be called. From this followed the subsidiary “lie” that Iraq under Saddam’s regime posed a two-edged mortal threat. On the one hand, we were informed, there was a distinct (or even “imminent”) possibility that Saddam himself would use these weapons against us and/or our allies; and on the other hand, there was the still more dangerous possibility that he would supply them to terrorists like those who had already attacked us on 9/11 and to whom he was linked.

This entire scenario of purported deceit has been given a new lease on life by the indictment in late October of I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, then chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby stands accused of making false statements to the FBI and of committing perjury in testifying before a grand jury that had been convened to find out who in the Bush administration had “outed” Valerie Plame, a CIA agent married to the retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, IV. The supposed purpose of leaking this classified information to the press was to retaliate against Wilson for having “debunked” (in his words) “the lies that led to war.”

---

But the consensus on which Bush relied was not born in his own administration. In fact, it was first fully formed in the Clinton administration. Here is Clinton himself, speaking in 1998:
If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-destruction program.

Here is his Secretary of State Madeline Albright, also speaking in 1998:
Iraq is a long way from [the USA], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.

Here is Sandy Berger, Clinton’s National Security Adviser, who chimed in at the same time with this flat-out assertion about Saddam:
He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.

Finally, Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, was so sure Saddam had stockpiles of WMD that he remained “absolutely convinced” of it even after our failure to find them in the wake of the invasion in March 2003.

Nor did leading Democrats in Congress entertain any doubts on this score. A few months after Clinton and his people made the statements I have just quoted, a group of Democratic Senators, including such liberals as Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, and John Kerry, urged the President
to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq’s refusal to end its weapons-of-mass-destruction programs.

Nancy Pelosi, the future leader of the Democrats in the House, and then a member of the House Intelligence Committee, added her voice to the chorus:
Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.

This Democratic drumbeat continued and even intensified when Bush succeeded Clinton in 2001, and it featured many who would later pretend to have been deceived by the Bush White House. In a letter to the new President, a number of Senators led by Bob Graham declared:
There is no doubt that . . . Saddam Hussein has invigorated his weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical, and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf war status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies.

Senator Carl Levin also reaffirmed for Bush’s benefit what he had told Clinton some years earlier:
Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations, and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton agreed, speaking in October 2002:
In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical- and biological-weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.

Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, agreed as well:
There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. . . . We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.

Even more striking were the sentiments of Bush’s opponents in his two campaigns for the presidency. Thus Al Gore in September 2002:
We know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.

And here is Gore again, in that same year:
Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.

Now to John Kerry, also speaking in 2002:
I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force—if necessary—to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.

Perhaps most startling of all, given the rhetoric that they would later employ against Bush after the invasion of Iraq, are statements made by Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, also in 2002:
Kennedy: We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.
Byrd: The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical- and biological-warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons.2

Liberal politicians like these were seconded by the mainstream media, in whose columns a very different tune would later be sung. For example, throughout the last two years of the Clinton administration, editorials in the New York Times repeatedly insisted that
without further outside intervention, Iraq should be able to rebuild weapons and missile plants within a year [and] future military attacks may be required to diminish the arsenal again.

The Times was also skeptical of negotiations, pointing out that it was hard to negotiate with a tyrant who has no intention of honoring his commitments and who sees nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as his country’s salvation.

So, too, the Washington Post, which greeted the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001 with the admonition that
[o]f all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is more dangerous—or more urgent—than the situation in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade’s efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction. That leaves President Bush to confront a dismaying panorama in the Persian Gulf [where] intelligence photos . . . show the reconstruction of factories long suspected of producing chemical and biological weapons.3

I've served up a big dose of quotes because what Podhoretz writes must be repeated in as many places as possible, including here.

Via Power Line: CIA Refers Washington Post Leak for Investigation
This could be very good news indeed: the CIA's general counsel has taken the first step toward a criminal investigation of the agency's leak relating to alleged secret detention centers in Eastern Europe:

The Washington Post got caught playing with fire last week when it published an article describing a series of secret CIA-run prisons containing captured and apparently informative terrorists. The problem? The Post may have run afoul of the law by publishing classified information. This information may have been leaked by a source within the government, which is also a crime, so the Post will at least have company in this investigation.

I care not whether that company is Republican or Democrat; I only care that they pay for their perfidy: we are at war, and in case it hasn't occurred to the Washington Post, western civilization can't afford for them to undermine the United States government and the safety of its citizens and its faithful allies. What the hell is wrong with WaPo editors that they don't get that? Too nuanced?

It appears that once the Fitzgerald investigation wrapped up without so much as questioning Joe Wilson on some basic timelines, the Post thought they could get away with an egregious breach of national security in the form of the "black prison" story. But the CIA's general council begs to differ, and it's damned well about time.

The Justice Department should investigate the leaks and charge those involved. The chips can fall where they may; I'm goal-oriented.

French Prime Napolean Dominique de Villepin has unveiled his plan to mollify the Islamist-led Muslim rioters who have destroyed millions of Euros in private property in Allah's name:

French PM announces raft of measures for riot-hit poor suburbs.

The plan, outlined before parliament, employs the timeless French tradition of surrender even before identifying the attackers' demands. With a nod to France's dream of Israeli appeasement of terrorism to the point of its own destruction, the plan calls for showering the rioters' communities with money, subsidized jobs and special protections against racism(whatever that means), then a waiting period to see what they will destroy prior to the next round of concessions.

LGF notes, "No word on whether similar handouts are planned for those who lost cars and shops at the hands of these poor disaffected youths."

Does anyone else see the parallels with the Israeli/Palestinian "problem"? Apparently yes.

More as it happens.

Mark Steyn in NRO enumerates the possible costs of Joe Wilson's fifteen minutes:

Suppose a guy yells “Fire!” in a crowded theater, and the audience hisses back, “Shh! We’re in the middle of a play about how Bush engaged in a massive conspiracy to use a small chimney fire as a pretext for burning down some other theater three years ago.”

That’s pretty much what happened the other week. The president of Iran announced that Israel “must be wiped off the map” — and the entire capital city of the world’s hyperpower hissed back, “Shh! Patrick Fitzgerald’s about to indict Scooter Libby!” Insofar as I understand the Left’s three-year investment in Joseph C. Wilson IV, it’s that the selfless patriot exposed the Bush administration’s rationale for the war — Saddam’s WMD — as a lie cooked up by a cabal of sinister neocon warmongers (Clinton, Gore, Kerry, etc). Just for the record, WMD was never my rationale. As I’ve said on many occasions, when it comes to toppling dictators, there’s no such thing as an “illegitimate” rationale. In his obstruction of U.N. weapons inspectors, Saddam certainly acted as if he had WMD and, in his “trade” missions to Niger (principal exports: uranium, goats, cowpeas, and onions), as if he were eager to acquire more. There’s something to be said for taking a chap at his word.

The American Thinker's James Lewis has an interesting examination of evidence that Joe Wilson was and still is acting traitorously against America as an agent provocateur working for the French.

The obvious first question is "why?" Lewis' answer:

French hatred of American power is the reason why France pressured Turkey (anxious to enter the EU) to block the US IV Infantry Division from crossing Iraq’s northern border to help knock over Saddam Hussein. Had the IV ID hit Saddam from the North while Tommy Franks attacked from the South, the current Iraqi insurrection might have been crushed even before it got started, the Baathist hardcore unable to flee north to the Sunni Triangle and entrench itself among the small percentage of Iraqis who benefited from Saddam’s rule. The original plan envisioned just such a pincer movement. We therefore owe many of our 2,000 soldiers’ deaths to deliberate and malicious French sabotage, with thanks to Dominique de Villepin and Jacques Chirac.

There is every reason to believe that France desperately wants this White House to be weakened or overthrown. They would be happy with Hillary Clinton or any other Democrat as president, because the Euro-socialist, non-interventionist base of that party is compatible with French policies and strategies. European emphasis on the United Nations as the forum for handling international conflicts plays to France’s strongest asset in world affairs, its veto-wielding Security Council seat, and its large number of Francophone former colonies, each with a vote in the General Assembly. A strong America wielding its mighty military force is de Villepin’s worst nightmare.

Okay, so that last line might soon be subject to revision, but he's got the rest of it right.

One question not raised by Lewis: why did Wilson stop in France on the way back from his Nigerian "mission"?

HT: JunkYardBlog

UPDATE: NRO's Michael Ledeen has been conversing with his ouija board again.
UPDATE: More from The American Thinker, Mac's Mind and Strata-Sphere.

Amir Taheri, editor of the French quarterly "Politique internationale," has the story of how Muslims have set French cities alight. Francophiles and America-haters won't like what this portends for their dreams of peace and brotherhood with Islamists, as it turns out they hate de Villepin and me and you too. There are some for whom appeasement means nothing but weakness and a reason to murder. They are Islamists and they are coming to a theater near you.

I can't wait to read at Kos and the DUh how Rove is worse than the Islamist rioters in France.

Note this take from House Of Wheels, and LGF's Paris Intifada Root Causes. Pretty serious.

Recalling John F'n Kerry's "global test" for such matters, should French leadership, if there is such a thing, invite these "troubled youths" for brunch? Perhaps open a dialogue? Take it to the U.N.?

Here's another idea: send in the military and wield a heavy stick, because these assholes have declared war on their host country, and war is what they should reap, ended only by unconditional surrender, a plane trip back from whence their parents came, and revocation of French citizenship. Then we'd see how long this nonsense lasts.

Here's the problem: the French won't do it, and so France will be lost to Islam.

UPDATE:
Captain's Quarters:
Bad to Worse in France
Rioting has spread from Paris to the Mediterranean, with arson attacks in Avignon, Cannes and Nice, as well as to Strasbourg and Rouen. The attackers are evil people; a couple of days ago they doused a disabled woman with gasoline and set her afire. Today they torched a nursery school and interfered with rescue personnel:
In one attack, youths in the eastern Paris suburb of Meaux prevented paramedics from evacuating a sick person from a housing project. They pelted rescuers with rocks and then torched the waiting ambulance, an Interior Ministry official said.

Belmont Club:
The 11th Night
Just hours after French President Jacques Chirac publicly condemned violence and rioting in Paris ... police were fired on by rioters. Ten officers were wounded ... two of them seriously, when police clashed with about 200 youths who were hurling stones and other projectiles ... The incident came only a few hours after Chirac made his first public address since the riots began.

Mark Steyn:
Wake up, Europe, you've a war on your hands
If Chirac isn't exactly Charles Martel, the rioters aren't doing a bad impression of the Muslim armies of 13 centuries ago: They're seizing their opportunities, testing their foe, probing his weak spots. If burning the 'burbs gets you more ''respect'' from Chirac, they'll burn 'em again, and again. In the current issue of City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple concludes a piece on British suicide bombers with this grim summation of the new Europe: ''The sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced by the nightmare of permanent conflict.'' Which sounds an awful lot like a new Dark Ages.

Former Democratic Governor and Senator Zell Miller has his sights set on the real problem in the Plame/Wilson affair: the CIA, who appear to have set up a domestic dirty tricks squad whose members include Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson.

Some absurdly claim that Plame had nothing to do with her husband's political activities against President Bush. But let it be clear. Plame could not have done what Wilson did and gotten away with it. Wilson could not have done what he did without Plame giving him a way to do it.

Something has to be done. We can't let the CIA become the domestic dirty tricks shop, with Republican and Democratic agents each trying to pull down their opposing presidents.
We need a Plame rule. Any family member of a CIA agent tapped to help out must live by the same rules regarding information disclosure and domestic political manipulations as those imposed on the agent. If the family member fails to live by those rules, the agent is terminated.

Clearly this will restrict the flexibility of the CIA. But who ever thought that the flexibility given to CIA agents would be misused to destabilize a U.S. president? No one — until Valerie Plame.

Of course Miller is correct. It is therefore time for a comprehensive managerial and operational audit of the CIA, with special attention to the roles of Valerie Plame, her husband and their partners, whoever they might be, in undermining the Bush White House prior to the 2004 Presidential election. I hope naming both the agency's and the media's players in this mess will form a good part of Scooter Libby's defense because I want to hear his side of the story. The air needs to be cleared in Washington in time for the 2006 elections.

The Wilson/Plame story is proving to have legs out of all proportion to original expectations, with wildly divergent takes on its meaning and lessons, but there is always one guy who can see a story in its entirety right from the outset. In the case of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame, that guy is Mark Steyn:

Well, Joseph C Wilson IV's 15 minutes is now in its third year, and judging from the pass given to him by the major newspapers and TV networks there's no end in sight. Why would the media collude in this fraudulent buffoon's self-aggrandization? After all, the first folks he lied to were them. But they seem to have decided their investment in him is now so deep, they're stuck with him. This is what I wrote a year and a half ago, in the fond belief that the chapter-and-verse exposure of his falsehoods would finally drive Wilson from public life. If only.

Heroic Senator Harry Reid (D.-Bizarroworld) finally brought it to everyone's attention with his brave takeover of the Senate: President Bush lied about the causes for war in Iraq, manipulating intelligence and fooling Congress into supporting the invasion. So masterful were Bush's machinations that he apparently travelled back in time and fiddled with the facts years before he was elected to the White House.

There's only one man who could have thought of such a diabolical scheme: Karl Rove. And Senator Harry Reid (D.-Bizarroworld) wants Rove's head before Bush goes back in time again and wipes out all the evidence of his going back in time the first time he went back in time.

Got that?

Muslims have set fire to Paris suburbs over the last several days and are claiming territory in France for the caliphate. In a deliciously ironic twist, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has called on his fellow French citizens to "avoid stigmatizing areas", especially, one must assume, those destroyed by rioting Muslims. In other words, don't call the troublemakers (what do we call them, anyway: insurgents? Freedom fighters? Minutemen? ) on their behavior. Bow to their violence and ask them what they want from you, their anxious new surrender-monkeys. This follows the established French practice of cowering and appeasement in the face of an enemy invasion.

I pray for the French, because they really don't deserve to get eaten alive by Islamofascism, but that's what is going to happen to them. The rioters have already been emboldened by their fellow Islamists in Britain, Sweden, Spain, Morocco, Thailand, everywhere that idiots fail to understand the only way to answer Islamist violence is by crushing it. As each day passes and the violence spreads, the French will be hoist ever higher on their own obstructionist, trouble-making petard, eventually to be overrun yet again by the very forces they have sought to appease.

It seems like only yesterday that France was poised to become the great "counterweight" to American power in the world; now it is fast becoming de Villepin's gateway to jihad in the west.

UPDATE:
The Belmont Club has more on the riots, including a link to Small Dead Animals' coverage of the unreported ongoing riots in Denmark.

How long before Toronto and Montreal go up in flames?

Little Green Footballs has an interesting juxtaposition of stories regarding the nature of Islam:

Al-Guardian: Don't Fear Shari'a
Religion of Peace vs. 8-Year Old Boy

Chilling.

The Fourth Rail has another story of the depravity of Islamofascism, a term apparently coined by the far right to defame innocent freedom fighters.

UPDATE:
LGF corrects the story behind this series of photos:

LGF reader Baikal emailed about these upsetting pictures posted by Bareknucklepolitics.com with the title: 8 Year Old Iranian Boy Caught Stealing Bread. Those readers who were skeptical of the title, it turns out, were correct; Baikal contacted the publisher, Peykeiran, and after a confusing exchange received the following reply:

Hi! It seems you have not read the text that came with the pictures. In irna there some who earn their bread by Maareke giry. In our case one of these maarke gir _ha had hired a kid to do those unhuman show. You read the text that came with photos. bye