Just In Case You'd Forgotten

George Bush, Dick Cheney, and the entire current presidential administration have repeatedly lied to you.

Consider: Report Discounts Iraqi Arms Threat.

That's right. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Iraq had no capacity to develop any weapons of mass destruction. Nor did it have any concrete plans to develop any. Do you remember the first justification for war with Iraq?

Bush knew that "Saddam had weapons." He even, in the 2003 State of the Union Address, frightened us all with tales of Saddam's thousands of liters of anthrax, enough to "kill several million people." Millions! Whatever will we do? Cheney said that "[Saddam] has, in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons" (Note: not weapons programs, mind you. Cheney said weapons.). Rumsfeld even knew where to find them: "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." Well, he sort of knew where they were. And you do remember when National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice terrified us all by saying that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," don't you? For Chrissakes, Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the UN and solemnly swore that Iraq possessed "stockpiles" of chemical agents and lots of weaponized biological agents.

Here's a bit of the Washington Post article, the first link in this post:

The government's most definitive account of Iraq's arms programs, to be released today, will show that Saddam Hussein posed a diminishing threat at the time the United States invaded and did not possess, or have concrete plans to develop, nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, U.S. officials said yesterday.

The officials said that the 1,000-page report by Charles A. Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, concluded that Hussein had the desire but not the means to produce unconventional weapons that could threaten his neighbors or the West. President Bush has continued to assert in his campaign stump speech that Iraq had posed "a gathering threat."

The officials said Duelfer, an experienced former United Nations weapons inspector, found that the state of Hussein's weapons-development programs and knowledge base was less advanced in 2003, when the war began, than it was in 1998, when international inspectors left Iraq.

Emphasis added.

I don't know how to put this any more plainly: IRAQ POSED ABSOLUTELY ZERO THREAT TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Zero. None. Nada. Zilch. Not a goddamn bit of threat.

They lied to you. Straight up lied. They didn't misstate, or misspeak, make an honest mistake, or overestimate. They straight lied to all of us. And plenty of people have paid for that.

We'll all be paying for it for years to come.