James Fallows, who has forgotten more about Iraq than The Boy Emperor, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have ever learned about it (combined), tears through Bush's pathetic tissue of lies on the issue of whether Democrats are equally culpable for the Iraq disaster. The key section of Fallows' piece:
Everybody was not, in fact, working from the same misleading information. The administration's line about WMD these days is: OK, we might have been wrong -- but everybody was wrong, and everybody came to the same conclusion we did. The foreigners came to that conclusion through their intelligence services, and the Democrats (especially that weaselly Kerry and ambitious Hillary) did it when they voted for the war resolution. But at the time, Administration officials were most emphatically NOT saying "hey, we're all operating in the dark here." The implied message of every briefing for reporters, every speech to the public, and every background session with legislators, was: If you knew what we knew, then you'd be as alarmed as we are. That was the message of Dick Cheney's statement that "there can be no doubt" that Iraq "now" had weapons of mass destruction, of Condi Rice's warning about the mushroom cloud, and of Colin Powell's presentation to the UN. The argument over Iraq's capabilities was by definition one sided, because the Administration's presumed insider knowledge trumped what anyone else could say. To pretend this was just a big widely-shared confusion is dishonest and wrong.
Damned right. Now that Bush and his fellow thugs have been shown to have been disastrously wrong, they're trying to say that they didn't pull the "inside info" trick on everyone. That's perhaps the most brazen lie of all.
And they're not going to get by with it.
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