MR. RUSSERT: As you well remember back in October of 2002, Congress voted to authorize the president to attack Iraq if he decided that that was in the best interest of the United States. The primary rationale provided by the administration was that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. Nearly 180 members in the House of Representatives cited the nuclear threat in their speeches as they voted to vote for authorization. I want to go back and show you what you said in October of 2002 about Saddam. "...once a madman like Saddam Hussein is able to deliver his arsenal, whether"--it's--"chemical, biological or nuclear weapons"--there's--"no telling when an American city will be attacked at his direction or with his support. ...the threat from Saddam Hussein's terrorist state. ...Only regime change can remove the danger from Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Only by taking them out of his hands and destroying them can we be certain that terror weapons will not wind up in the hands of terrorists."This is the kind of deceipt I thought Spinsanity would be all over (they're too busy playing Fair and Balanced and trying desperately to nitpick at Dean and Moveon.org to notice this stuff, I suppose) and I haven't got the energy or the ability to control my rage long enough to point out what should be obvious to every sentient being about DeLay's soulless mendacity, I just want to draw attention to Russert's blithe acceptance of DeLay's response, his failure to question a single statement made by that hypocritical troll, then his little tapdance to support the idea that everybody thought Saddam had WMD, and his opening the door for a little Clinton bashing which, if you follow the link, you'll see DeLay wasted no time in proceeding with. Fine, we know what DeLay is, he is a lying politician without a shred of moral or intellectual credibility. We expect him to trot out the party line. Russert is supposed to be a journalist; Russert's job is to investigate, analyze, interpret, and basically help reveal the truth. He clearly has no desire or intention to do any of those things.
Why haven't we found significant stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction? And was the country, the world, misled in the suggestion that Saddam possessed biological and chemical weapons in the imminent--and the risk was imminent?
REP. DeLAY: Well, first, Tim, I don't accept your premise. The president didn't overemphasize weapons of mass destruction as the only reason to go into Iraq. And in my own remarks, if you had given the entire remarks, you would have seen that I went through a complete list of things that this--Saddam Hussein has been doing, that has been proven to have been right. First and foremost, he used weapons of mass destruction against Iran, against Kuwait, against his own people. So we knew that he had the--at least chemical weapons of mass destruction because he had used them in the past. He was violating U.N. resolutions for 10, almost 12 years. He violated every agreement that he made after he lost the war in Desert Storm.
He lied to the American people. He lied to the world. He supported terrorists. We have proven that to--to be the case so far. He had weapons of mass destruction. I think we'll still find them. But it wasn't the only thing. And I--we have found that he has supported terrorists in Israel. He had missiles aimed at Israel. He supported terrorists around the world. It was in his best interest to do so. So I think we did the right thing in the war on terror and that is to go after the terrorist Saddam Hussein, and we got him.
MR. RUSSERT: President Bush, former President Clinton, even the Germans, the French said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. If, in fact, we do not find significant stockpiles, has this been a colossal intelligence failure, and should there be an aggressive, bipartisan attempt to find out what may have gone wrong?
OK, so it looks like I decided to proceed with the Airing of Grievances after all. The So-Called Liberal Media has let me down the most in the past year.
