From the Tubes (Not Trucks)

[burninglondon]

Today my love of colorful charts and my hatred for the Bush Administration's tendency to be about as straight as a Slinky have met in a happy-fun nexus.  What has brought about this overlap in my Venn Diagram?  The Center for Public Integrity has created The War Card, a detailed account of 935 false statements made by the Bush Administration in the

Comments

[cirsium]

To be fair, I'm not sure it's completely clear how much of this was bad intel and how much was deliberate fabrication. Iraq certainly was the sort of place one would expect to find WMD, and Hussein was doing some dodgy stuff (blocking weapon inspectors' access, etc).

I'm sure you're not interested in the distinction between a half-truth and an outright lie, but I feel compelled to play devil's advocate.

[burninglondon]

For the record, the weapons inspectors didn't leave Iraq until we told them we were going to start bombing. That being said, supposing the intel was shoddy. How was it then that Iraq was an imminent threat requiring military action in September (first spike) but not so immediate of a threat that it couldn't wait until after the mid-term elections? The correlation between the increase in the number of demonstrably false statements (to the credit of CPI, they never call them lies) with politically opportune moments makes me unwilling to give the administration the benefit of the doubt.