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Any Boulderites or Coloradians want to stomp on the local lefty screed sheet? They're really asking for it with this title. (This is apparently an in-house editorial.)

From The Daily Camera of Boulder, CO

http://www.bouldernews.com/bdc/editorials/article/0,1713,BDC_2489_2012009,00.html

Among the deceivers

Does it matter if we were misled on Iraq? Hell, yes

June 5, 2003
Dictators and democrats alike love to clothe their policies in the language of altruism. But once shorn of rhetorical raiment, naked realpolitik often lies beneath. Now, amid rising doubts about the Bush and Blair administrations' case for attacking Iraq, they are trying to wrap a towel around the nakedness of their misdirections.
George Bush and Tony Blair told us that Iraq posed an imminent threat to our security. Saddam supported the al-Qaida network that attacked America on Sept. 11, 2001, they warned. With great specificity, they described putative stocks of weapons of mass destruction, asserting that Iraq might have a nuke within six months and missiles capable of delivering WMD.
The war mostly went well. Major fighting was over quickly, and while thousands of Iraqis were killed, fewer than 200 British and American troops died (though more go down each week). The ruthless Saddam is gone.
But then things got tricky. Promises of quick transition to Iraqi control have been chucked, efforts to rebuild a destroyed nation are foundering and unrest among the masses rises daily.
And the rationales for a hurry-up war aren't holding up well at all. There was no Saddam-al-Qaida axis. And despite a concerted effort to find them, no WMD have been found. The best evidence so far, two trailers that might have been used to make bio-weapons, hardly constitute a serious threat.
Increasingly, it's clear that pre-war "evidence" of WMD was exaggerated, questioned by intelligence experts and even some of Bush and Blair's top deputies. Some "intelligence" proved to be crude forgeries, or plagiarized from decade-old graduate-student work. A transcript of a meeting between Secretary of State Colin Powell and his British counterpart, Jack Straw, reveals that both men fretted over trumped-up WMD claims. U.S. News and World Report revealed that during a Feb. 1 rehearsal of his U.N. speech urging war, a frustrated Powell threw his script in the air and said "I'm not reading this. This is bull----." (He read the "bull----," anyway.) Intelligence grunts angry that their work was spun, edited and politicized are quietly leaking the truth.
To all this, the Bush and Blair administrations and their media attack dogs respond: It doesn't matter. The point is, they bark, we got rid of a monster, as the discovery of mass graves proves (conveniently ignoring the fact that most of the dead are Shiites slaughtered by Saddam because Bush the first abandoned them following the 1991 Gulf War).

I quoted the whole thing as it is soooooo typical of lefties (and esp of the useful idiots that enable their fostering and defense of totalitarianism) that it is purity of intent, or even the manner that intent is expressed in words (whether it is ever followed up on or not -- see: Clinton, W.J.) that matters more than RESULTS.

I thank God every day I don't have a brain that works like this.

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