There's the Democrat senators:
"The president's statement that Iraq was attempting to acquire African uranium was not a mistake. It was not inadvertent. It was not a slip," charged Armed Services Committee ranking member Carl Levin...Then there's the 9 dwarves (er, the 6 that showed up):
Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (search) of South Dakota said the uranium flap had created such a controversy that it had "gone beyond a matter of intelligence."
...
Off Capitol Hill, Sen. Ted Kennedy (search), D-Mass., said the president's use of bad intelligence to make the case for war against Iraq had "undermined America's prestige and credibility."
In their most unified indictment yet of the Bush administration's policies in Iraq, most of the Democratic candidates for president told the NAACP's annual convention Monday that the president misled the public to justify the war.There's just one problem. What the President said was:
The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.It was true and it still is true:
British officials admitted that the country was Niger but insisted that the intelligence behind it was genuine and had nothing to do with the fake documents. It was convincing and they were sticking with it, the officials said.That plus the fact that most of the American people rightly thought Saddam was a nasty piece of work who deserved much more than he got.
They dismissed a report from a former US diplomat who was sent to Niger to investigate the claims and rejected them. "He seems to have asked a few people if it was true and when they said 'no' he accepted it all," one official said. "We see no reason at all to change our assessment."
As Glenn Reynolds notes:
There are lots of real issues (hey, I'm giving 'em away for free here, every day) that they could use, but they're running with this one because they hate Bush more than they care about the truth.Shhh, Glenn. Don't tell 'em. Being kind to the clueless is one thing, but these are Democrats!
