Must read of the day

Now that Pres. Bush finally went on the offensive as the media and the Democrats drove his Iraq-related poll numbers into the tank, the Democrats are griping and fidgeting about being called out on their calumny that the President lied to get the US to go to war. The Democrats' mindset is so ridiculous, that Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) claimed he's not responsible for his vote to approve attacking Iraq! (And before Oyster goes up in arms about Instapundit truncating the quote and Rockefeller clarifying his statement, read this extended excerpt -- it makes that Senator look even worse).

One of the fathers of current international conservative doctrine, Norman Podhoretz, analyzed the Democrats current falsehoods in Commentary Magazine. His feature article is available at Opinion Journal. Here are a couple of excerpts:

Among the many distortions, misrepresentations and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed.

What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon characters, this allegation simply cannot be killed off, no matter what.

* * *
. . . the consensus on which Mr. Bush relied was not born in his own administration. In fact, it was first fully formed in the Clinton administration. Here is Bill Clinton himself, speaking in 1998:

If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program.

Here is his Secretary of State Madeline Albright, also speaking in 1998:

Iraq is a long way from [the USA], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.

Here is Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Adviser, who chimed in at the same time with this flat-out assertion about Saddam:

He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.

Finally, Mr. Clinton's secretary of defense, William Cohen, was so sure Saddam had stockpiles of WMD that he remained "absolutely convinced" of it even after our failure to find them in the wake of the invasion in March 2003.

There's much more. And the Left has no answer for this for one simple reason: each of their heroes believed that Iraq had WMD before it became expedient to bash the President by advocating the opposite position.