WorkingForChange-Cheney's trouble with the truth

You've got to hand it to Dick Cheney -— no other modern politician has come so close to perfecting the theater of the absurd. Even as he protests his innocence of lying about matters of state, he lies about matters of state.

In two major speeches Friday and Monday, the vice president -— who has long insisted Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida were allies, Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, we would be greeted as liberators in Baghdad and the Iraqi insurgency is in its 'last throes" -— again evidenced his trademark inability to speak the truth.

All of these "facts" were already disproven. Why are they still trying this rhetoric?

Continuing the administration's recent shrill defensive barrage over whose fault the Iraq mess is and with the truth chasing the lies in full public view, Cheney had the gall to smear the war's critics as 'corrupt and shameless." Then, within a few sentences, he showed again why 52 percent of those recently polled by Newsweek believe Cheney deliberately "misused or manipulated" prewar intelligence.

First, he shamelessly repeated the absurd notion that a bum-rushed Congress, most of which does not have high security clearance, was privy to the same intelligence as he and his war-salesmen allies. In fact, not only was Cheney and his staff poring over the classified testimonials of an array of known liars, forgers, drunks, opportunists and desperate exiles we now know supplied White House speechwriters with their best lines, he also had access to the intelligence community's combined disclaimers, rebuttals and outright denunciations of these sources and their conveniently tawdry tales.

"Yes, more than 100 Democrats voted to authorize him to take the nation to war," wrote former Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., in a devastating statement in The Washington Post on Sunday. 'Most of them, though, like their Republican colleagues, did so in the legitimate belief that the president and his administration were truthful in their statements that Saddam Hussein was a gathering menace -— that if Hussein was not disarmed, the smoking gun would become a mushroom cloud."

They were lied to like we were lied to. All to get Iraq. Was it for the oil? Or just because Daddy didn't get him the first time?

WorkingForChange-Cheney's trouble with the truth