So This Is How Idiots Backpedal...

“O, what a tangled web we weave,/When first we practice to deceive!” — Walter Scott, 1808

And the lies keep mounting...

At this point it’s becoming less and less significant whether or not Saddam Hussein actually had a nuclear weapons program; to little George, the evidence was irrelevant. Saddam was evil, and therefore he must have had them. Facts be damned. There have been a few fantastic op-ed columns in the Post across the past couple of days. Two in this morning’s edition, “Inconvenient Facts...,” by Harold Meyerson, and ...Unshakable Faith, by Richard Cohen, do a fantastic job of analyzing just what the hell’s going on in Duh-bya’s monomaniacally dogmatic brain. I’d consider both must-reads, so I won’t rehash them here (please do take the time to read them yourselves).

I also won’t go into too much detail on Michael Kinsley’s column yesterday, “...Or More Lies From The Usual Suspects?” but I will call attention to one intriguing point. Bush’s latest claim — that the information may have been false, but his now-infamous State of the Union statement, “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” remains true; he’s just saying those pesky Brits thought it was true, he didn’t say it was true, heh, heh, heh. If ever there were a prime example of CYA thinking, this is it — he knew he was stretching the truth, and chose his words carefully to edge just out of outright “lie” territory. But unfortunately, his linguistic skills are proving as substandard as his ethical integrity: If he’d said the Brits believed the information, he’d be correct in saying the statement was factual, but by saying they learned the information, he is necessarily implying that the information itself is factual and can be learned.

This guy just keeps getting himself in deeper — at least with those of us with the capacity for reason — and doesn’t even realize he’s doing it.