Bush lied!

Boy, it feels good to get that out of my system. As a card-carrying member of the America-hating, flag-burning, blood-on-my-hands Commie left, I have always thought that Bush Lied! (tm), but I've been too scared to say so. True patriots like Dean Esmay have cowed me into not revealing my real evil agenda to the world at large. (He's worked his magic on so many other lefty sites that for every mention of Bush lied! on a liberal site, that phrase appears approximately 45,000 times on conservative sites.) But no more! I will proudly proclaim now that Bush Lied! People Died!

Ahem.

See the thing is, as people like the execrable Dean Esmay are so fond of pointing out, a lie is a difficult thing to prove, especially in court. I can't look into George W. Bush's mind (not that I would want to) and figure out what he knew and what he didn't know. My problem has always been, he didn't *care* whether what he said was a lie or not. And I consider that to be equal to or worse than an actual literal prove-it-in-court falsehood, especially when it comes to the Leader of the Free World. His people had a plan, and they were going to do whatever it took to make that into reality.

Mounds of real evidence show that Bush's gang wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11, and before Bush was even elected. Mounds of real evidence from both inside and outside the administration shows that they minimized or ignored evidence that didn't support their position, and hopped up anything, no matter how trivial or possibly false, that might do the opposite. (Colin Powell and the fake anthrax at the U.N.? Aluminum tubes? Unmanned drones? Anyone? Bueller?)

This is eminently acceptable behavior for, say, a defense lawyer. His job is to convince a jury that his client is innocent, and whether his client did the crime or not is immaterial. In our system of justice (at least for now) everyone deserves the best defense they can get. It's up to the jury to decide the fate of the accused.

This is not acceptable behavior for the Leader of the Free World. It just isn't. But that position is perhaps a little too nuanced for a slogan; a little too logical for the screaming harridans of the Right. Let a thousand terrorism experts proclaim that the administration "fixed intelligence around the policy," and that the war has made us less safe, not more. It's all just elitist America-hating to Esmay and Coulter and Hannity.

And the world rolls on. For now.