But, but, didn't all the Democrats agree with Bush about Saddam?

Writing before the Dark Lord's latest pronouncment of maldicion on the unbelievers and heretics, Gene Lyons wrote about this silly but poisonous argument that the Democrats shouldn't criticize Bush's preventive war in Iraq because they all believed, well, whatever Bush and Cheney are claiming at the moment their cause for going to war was: Rewriting History Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 11/16/05.

In the case of Bush holding up Kerry's words from the time of the war resolution as exoneration for himself, Lyons writes of Kerry:

Silly man. Kerry believed, or pretended to believe, like many politically timid Democrats, Bush's deeply cynical assurances.

Lyons also addresses Cheney's role in the WMD war fraud:

But did the Bush administration spike the punch ? Absolutely, it did.

Recently, it was reported that one al-Qa'ida prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, was the source of bogus administration charges that Saddam and Osama bin Laden were working together. This "intelligence" was obtained by sending him to Egypt for what Newsweek described last year as "more fearsome" interrogation. The Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that his story made no sense; he'd made it up. The DIA conclusion was kept hidden. Al-Libi has since recanted. ...

Iraq's nuclear threat, however, was largely a figment of the fevered imaginations of ideologues around Vice President Dick Cheney. Almost all the intelligence was highly suspect, or worse. Take the famous aluminum tubes that Condi Rice insisted could only be used to manufacture centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs. She said so on national TV after a nicely timed leak to Judith Miller put them on The New York Times front page. Cheney pronounced them "irrefutable evidence," and Bush touted them, too. In reality, nuclear scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory had physically examined the tubes and pronounced them useless for centrifuges. State Department experts reached the same conclusion. That crucial evidence was omitted from the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. It's the same everywhere you look. With regard to nuclear weapons, the Bush administration promoted junk intelligence to the status of Holy Writ, hiding or stifling dissenting views. Everybody who's ever been employed by a large bureaucracy knows how that works. The only real question is how successfully they hoaxed themselves before they began lying to the rest of us. (my emphasis)

And, of course, there were the forged documents from Niger, which Cheney's former chief of staff Scooter Libby has already been indicted in connection to the coverup of the Iraqi nuclear-weapons scam this administration ran in 2002-3.

No, it wasn't Bill Clinton or Howard Dean or Michael Moore who was hyping the nuclear-weapons threat. It certainly wasn't Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Commission he heads. They were saying that it was unlikely that Iraq had such a program at all.

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