Daily Howler

Good stuff, this is an older one, but still good.

We can’t explain why our current lib/Dem elites are so intellectually lazy. It has now been several years, but they keep repeating this hopeless meme—and going down in flames when they do. The conversation is hopeless but constant. Here is the way it works:

LIBERAL/DEMOCRAT: Bush lied when he said there were WMD!

MODERATOR: But Clinton/Gore/Kerry/Dean all said the same thing.

LIBERAL/DEMOCRAT: Yes, but what I really hate is when Bush or Powell said [move on to different complaint]...

We gave up when we saw Wolf do it. When Howard Dean did it eight months later, enthusiastic e-mailers wrote us, saying how brilliant he’d been.

For ourselves, we’d guess that Bush did think he would find some WMD in Iraq (see text from Fred Kaplan below). Indeed, Woodward directly asserts that Tommy Franks did believe there would be WMD. But a simple reading of basic texts show us how the Admin talked “shit” in the wake of the Downing Street memo. Yes, Clinton and Gore and Kerry did say that they thought there were WMD in Iraq. (Gore said it a few weeks after the Downing Street memo. See THE DAILY HOWLER, 6/3/04.) But they didn’t go out and lie through their teeth about the state of Saddam’s scary nukes. They didn’t go out and pimp those tubes in ways that were plainly inaccurate. They didn’t go out and talk that “shit” about the 45-minute attack. They didn’t go out and fake the intel about those scary unmanned aerial vehicles (Woodward, page 246) or about those scary trailers (Woodward, page 247). Nor did they talk about uranium from Niger, whatever you’ve decided to think about that. Did George Bush say there were WMD? Duh! So did every major Dem! For this reason, this is the weakest case against Bush—but lib and Dems just love to push it.