Oh, never mind...

Here's a one-two punch for you: hot on the heels of U.S. weapons inspector David "What WMD? You Just Wait For The Kay Report, You Terrorist-Loving Liberal Scum!" Kay's resignation for lack of finding even a thimbleful of evidence, Secretary of State Colin Powell is now saying that whether Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and biological (not to mention nuclear) weapons at all is "an open question". Yes, that's right, the same Colin Powell who one year ago told the United Nations that not only did we know that Saddam Hussein had WMD, but that if we didn't act immediately to rid him of those horrible weapons, he was going to give them to al-Qaeda or who knows who else and that we were all going to die. Remember that? When the Only Guy We Trusted in Bush's Cabinet stepped forward and told us fence-sitting liberals not to worry, that he had seen the evidence and we were entirely justified in overturning the past fifty years of international law, souring our relations with our allies, and pissing away all of the 9/11 goodwill towards that was left in the world for this pre-emptive war against a tinpot dictator who was having serious trouble threatening his own people in recent years, let alone a nation ten thousand miles away?

Surprise! It turns out that Colin Powell was 100% full of shit. The whole administration seems to be backing away from their earlier angrily insistent certainty as well - witness the sight of watching Dubya attempting to utter the phrase "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities" during Tuesday's State of the Union Address without tripping over his own tongue. Kind of makes you want to laugh, except that thousands of people are dead - over five hundred of them (and counting) American men and women - and hundreds of billions of dollars are going down the toilet - or to Haliburton, which is pretty much the same thing - for a cause that is becoming more and more a game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon's Weapons of Mass Destruction-Related Program Activities every day.

But here's the kicker - by and large, the American people don't really care. Love 'em or hate 'em, you have to give the Bush Administration credit for telling lies that would have gotten Bill Clinton impeached or imprisoned, even crucified. How do they get away with it? I think the secret is this: lie big and lie often. Make your lie so big that the political opposition and the press heistate to call you on it, because it's so freaking big, like calling black white; and then lie so often that by the time anyone gets around to debunking your last lie, you've already two whoppers ahead of them. It's brilliantly evil, and again it kind of makes you want to laugh.

Kind of.