LIES

Lies, lies, you're tellin' me that you'll be true
Lies, lies, That's all I ever hear from you (The Knickerbockers)

More good news for GWBush today:

Associated Press:

A lackluster unemployment report and fresh questions about President Bush's rationale for invading Iraq frame the second face-to-face encounter Friday night between Bush and Sen. John Kerry.

A final report from the chief U.S. weapons hunter in Iraq concluded that Saddam Hussein had no stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons, had no programs to make either them or nuclear bombs, and had little ability - or immediate plans - to revive those programs.

The findings contradicted Bush's main rationale for going to war, and Kerry charged the commander in chief with purposely exaggerating the evidence in the run-up to the invasion. "You don't make up or find reasons to go to war after the fact," Kerry said Thursday in Colorado.

Let's take this train of thought a little further down the tracks.

Here's Krugman today:

I first used the word "Orwellian" to describe the Bush team in October 2000. Even then it was obvious thatGeorge W. Bush surrounds himself with people who insist that up is down, and ignorance is strength. But the full costs of his denial of reality are only now becoming clear.

How did the occupation of Iraq go so wrong? (The security situation has deteriorated to the point where there are no safe places: a bomb was discovered on Tuesday in front of a popular restaurant inside the Green Zone.)

The insulation of officials from reality is central to the story. They wanted to believe Ahmad Chalabi's promises that we'd be welcomed with flowers; nobody could tell them different. They wanted to believe - months after everyone outside the administration realized that we were facing a large, dangerous insurgency and needed more troops - that the attackers were a handful of foreign terrorists and Baathist dead-enders; nobody could tell them different.

Why did the economy perform so badly? Long after it was obvious to everyone outside the administration that the tax-cut strategy wasn't an effective way of creating jobs, administration officials kept promising huge job gains, any day now. Nobody could tell them different.

It's the spin, stupid. Then this item from Reuters:

Times: U.S. Details Plan to Quell Iraq Insurgency

U.S. military and civilian officials have identified 20 to 30 towns and cities in Iraq (news - web sites) that must be pacified before nationwide elections can be held in January, The New York Times reported Friday.

Civilians involved in the process also told the Times that the new approach was formulated in part to counter criticism from President Bush's Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry , that the administration has no plan for Iraq.

Atrios has more about this, well worth reading:

Call Them Out

Is the media ever going to hold these people accountable for making military decisions and releasing terror alerts for political purposes? They're not even trying to hide it anymore. Could anything be more outrageous? I don't think the Rude Pundit is rude enough sometime.

Sometime's it's literally too much to believe. Lots of other folks have debunked Uncle Nasty's whoppers from the debate the other night, so I won;t go there. But please, people, keep this stuff in mind.

Let others know.

The truth will set you, and them, free.