[andyfox]

The Dems/Libs were just accepting what they saw and wanted to see because they know they're susceptible to being painted as too soft on foreign policy issues. But consider:

-Bush said that if we don't act, we'd see a mushroom cloud. The Dems didn't use this scare tactic.


-Bush said we found the WMDs. He was referring to the mobile weapons labs, which, had they been labs, would have been labs, not weapons. Turns out they were trucks which contained equipmentto make hydrogen for weather balloons.

-Bush told an adviser to look for evidence of Hussein's complicity in 9/11.

-Bush administration officials were prepared to use 9/11 as a pretext for invasion regardless of what the evidence showed as to who was actually responsible for 9/11.

-Bush sent Colin Powell to the UN with a briefcase full of misinformation.

-The Senate Intelligence Committee released its initial findings on prewar integlligence in July 2005. The committee's Republican chairman, Pat Roberts, promised that a Phase 2 to determine whether the White House had misled the public would arrive after the presidential election. It still hasn't. Murray Waas reported in the National Journal on that Vice President Cheney and Scooter Libby had refused to provide the committee with crucial documents, including Scooter Libby-written pasages from early drafts of Colin Powell's presentation of WMD evidence to the U.N.

-Vice President Cheney, early on, said that American troops would be greeted as liberators in Iraq. Last summer, he said the insurgency was in its last throes.

-In December, 2001, Cheney, on "Meet the Press" said "it's been pretty well confirmed" that there was a direct pre-9/11 link betwen Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence. When that link was later disproved, Cheney was confronted about his Meet the Press remark by Gloria Borger on CNBC. Three times Cheney told her that he never said it.

-In October, the president announced the foiling of ten Al Qaeda plots. USA Today reported that at least six of the ten "involved preliminary ideas about potential attacks, not terrorist operations that were about to be carried out."

-In June, President Bush said that "federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects" and that "more than half" of those had been convicted. The Washington Post found that only 39 of these convictions had involved terrorism or national security.

-Keith Olbermann recently compiled 13 "coincidences" in which "a political downturn for the administration is followed by a 'terror event'--a change in alert status, an arrest, a warning." For example, in 2002, during the fallout from the televised testimony of FBI whistle-blower Coleen Rowley, John Ashcroft broadcast via satellite from Russia that the government had "disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot" to explode a dirty bomb. What he was actually referring to was the arrest of one person, Jose Padilla, for allegedly exploring such a plan. The arrest had taken place one month earlier.

The Dems might have taken the politically expedient path to war; they might now also be taking what they see as the politically expedient path to electoral success in 2006 and 2008. They ought to be ashamed of themselves, but there is very little shame in a politician.

But the Bush admimistration has lied and spun and distorted and misled every step of the way. I don't find this particularly remarkable. What administration of any political stripe in any country hasn't done this when going to war? What is more remarkable is that people are claiming it ain't so.