Shocking! A politician lying............hang on a minute they do
that for a living but are not supposed to get caught!

It all stems from the fact that when honest politicians tell the
truth, they get voted out of office. The truth sometimes hurts.
Jimmy Carter can attest to what happens when you run a truthful
political campaign.

Carter's problem was not honesty, but being indecisive. And even his
strongest supporters recognized that Carter lacked the ability to make
decisions. He may one day be regarded as the most intelligent president
of the 20th century. But he was also one in which making no decision
was often considered a viable option. Circumstances which were unacceptable
to the voters of 1980.

The problem in Iraq may well be that even after all the dots were
connected, these did not lead to the expected outcome. Consider that Saddam
had used a particularly nasty nerve gas to kill several thousand Kurdish
citizens, and that the research by Iraq in chemical and biological weapons
was well known - even to the UN. And that lacking any such weapons, there
would have been little reason to keep UN Inspectors out of the country for
four years.

And also note that the popular media plays up the WMD subject (and at
least once every hour on NPR) but has little to say about the thousands of
graves which have been unearthed. Or that the entire population in a
number of towns were discovered to be exterminated.