Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

The Democrat liars and those who believe them

Suzanne Fields:

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The lied-about president finally pulled his boots on with a speech on Veterans Day, reproaching not just the liars but those who listen to lies: "It is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began." He reminded those with short memories that a bipartisan Senate investigation found that no pressure had been applied to alter the intelligence findings about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Look again, he said, at more than a dozen U.N. resolutions citing Saddam Hussein's possession and development of chemical, nuclear and biological weapons of mass destruction.
John Bolton, the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, cites the record of the Iraqis' own admission that they had developed chemical weapons, and their later assertion that they had destroyed them.
"They were obstructing the inspectors and it was perfectly reasonable to think that they still had those capabilities," the ambassador told me over lunch (of roast chicken) this week in Washington. "In retrospect we should have done better at probing that assumption."
But that doesn't diminish what was once reasonable to believe. He calls attention to the remarks of Chief Inspector Hans Blix in a briefing to the Security Council in 2002, that it was imperative that Iraq furnish strong proof of the claim that there were no biological, chemical or nuclear weapons left in Iraq.
"[I]t would need to provide convincing documentary or other evidence," Mr. Blix said of Iraq at the time. "Production of mustard gas is not exactly the same as production of marmalade." Only months before we went to war against Iraq, Mr. Blix found 122-mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker 105 miles southwest of Baghdad, and wrote that "they could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg." (Icebergs in the desert? But we got his point.) If, as Mr. Blix now claims, he was only being cautious and that the president "misled himself," Mr. Blix gave the president considerable assistance.
Norman Podhoretz notes in Commentary magazine that the chief of staff for Colin Powell, when he was the secretary of state, said "the consensus of the intelligence services 'was overwhelming' in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq that Saddam definitely had an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and that he was also in all probability well on the way to rebuilding the nuclear capability that the Israelis had damaged by bombing the Osirak reactor in 1981." There was also a credible belief that Iraq would be able to make a nuclear weapon in months to a year after it acquires 'sufficient weapons-grade fissile material.' "
The list of Democrats who believed as the president did, and fell all over themselves saying so, is a long one, and includes Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, his secretary of state; Sens. Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the current leader of the Democrats in the House. As Casey Stengel might say, you could Google it.
The warning by William James has a particular resonance for our time: "There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it."