Defending the Indefensible Bush Lies

From the increasingly irate (and why not!?!) Molly Ivins:

"You may recall that when even the administration finally admitted Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction (with that adorable video of President Bush on his hands and knees searching under sofas in the Oval Office for the missing WMD -- oh, it was so amusing, eight hundred American dead), we were treated to the following rationales:

1) Didn't make any difference because Saddam Hussein was a really, really bad guy anyway.

He was, of course, and it was always the only decent rationale for getting rid of him. It was the argument made by Tony Blair, but specifically rejected by the Bush administration. Paul Wolfowitz explained in Vanity Fair that human rights violations were not a sufficient consideration for invasion.

2) It was all Saddam's fault that we thought he had WMD. The wily coot fooled us by repeatedly denying that he had any, a fiendishly clever ploy.

3) He probably shipped them all to Syria just before we got there.

4) Get over it. We've heard enough from you people.

Torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere?

1) No worse than fraternity hazing.

2) Just some low-level, white-trash morons.

3) We haven't tortured nearly as many people as Saddam Hussein.

4) Al Qaeda never signed no stinkin' Geneva Conventions, so we have a right to torture them.

5) Shut up, they explained.

Torture was explicitly authorized at the highest levels of government.

1-5) See above, plus:

6) Did not.

7) So what?

8) 'I'm going to say it one more time. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to the law. That ought to comfort you. We're a nation of laws. We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might look at those laws, and that might comfort you.'

Problem is, the administration looked at the laws and decided to ignore them.

Ahmad Chalabi is not just a liar, con man, thief and faker of intelligence, but also apparently a spy for Iran.

1) Chalabi? Ahmad who? Never heard of him.

2) We cut off all ties with Chalabi some time ago. (Last week.)


The 9-11 Commission reports there is no evidence of collaboration between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, and in fact Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were all much bigger players with Al Qaeda.

1) The 9-11 Commission didn't say that.

2) The media are overplaying the story and are also lazy and outrageous. (Never mind that it's the media's fault as much as the administration's that 69 percent of the American people were under the misimpression that Saddam Hussein was directly tied to 9-11.)

3) We never claimed he was behind 9-11. No, we never did -- we may have implied it, we may have hinted, we may have suggested, insinuated, intimated, connoted, alluded to and said it between the lines, but we never said it, and you can't prove we did and we have no idea how the great majority of Americans ever got that silly idea in the first place. So stop reporting that it's not true.

4) We are tired of hearing from you people, this has been going on for almost 24 hours now and only Dead Reagan gets a week's worth of our undivided attention. Back to Kobe Bryant and Laci Peterson...