Got WMD's?

[alvarezadams]

No wonder they elected Shrub;

Half of Americans Still Believe In WMDs - They Saw Them on TV
A recent Harris Poll reports found that while “the U.S. and other countries have not found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, surprisingly more U.S. adults (50%) think that Iraq had such weapons when the U.S. invaded Iraq. This is an increase from 36 percent in February 2005.”

This is terrible news. Even President Bush has been forced to admit that his administration's number one justification for attacking Iraq was wrong, because in fact there were no weapons of mass destruction. The Harris Poll didn’t attempt to analyze why the number of misled Americans has actually increased in the past year, but perhaps it is because Senator Rick Santorum held a news conference not long ago in Washington and announced that WMDs had just been found in Iraq. A bit like announcing that, science be damned, the Sun is revolving around the Earth! Pentagon officials quickly dismissed the Senator's claims, which were based on the discovery of some leftover, nonfunctioning weapons from more than a a decade ago. Sheldon Rampton and I examine this phenomenon in our next book, The Best War Ever, excerpted below.

Writing for the Associated Press, Charles Hanley suggests that “timing may explain some of the poll result. Two weeks before the survey, two Republican lawmakers, Pennsylvania's Sen. Rick Santorum and Michigan's Rep. Peter Hoekstra, released an intelligence report saying 500 chemical munitions had been collected in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. … But the Pentagon and outside experts emphasized that these abandoned shells, many found in ones and twos, were 15 years old or more, their chemical contents were degraded, and they were unusable as artillery ordnance.” The AP quotes John Prados, author of Hoodwinked: The Documents that Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War, as saying, ''I think the Santorum-Hoekstra thing is the latest 'factoid,' but the basic dynamic is the insistent repetition by the Bush administration of the original argument” that Saddam had WMDs....

http://www.prwatch.org/node/5067

[alvarezadams]

1. Too sad to even comment on it, no?

[Cobalt-60]

2. They can't back off

I had people screaming in my face over this, in front of witnesses.
And now it turns out they were dead wrong.
They would lose face if they admitted that herr Rove and the boys fooled them.

[Selatius]

3. Read Mein Kampf (1925), Hitler tells you how to manipulate people

"All this was inspired by the principle— which is quite true in itself — that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."

-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1925), Vol. 1, Ch. 10