New Report "Justifies the War" says Cheney

This really takes the cake. The headline of today's article in the NY Times alone should be enough:

"Cheney Says Report Finding No Illicit Arms in Iraq Justifies War"

Have you ever had a moment when you're talking to someone, and they tell you something that is so clearly a lie, or so clearly untrue, so staggeringly untrue, that you're simply shocked into silence while you're mind attempts to reason out why they would say something so amazingly false? That you're not even able to respond to the substance of what they've said, because you don't even know where to begin? It's not even always that people are actually "lying" when they do this. Sometimes they think they're telling the truth. How is this possible? Good old George Orwell himself had a term for this: "Doublethink." He explains it pretty well in his classic novel 1984. Doublethink is:

"...the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. ... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. "

Orwell might have had the communists more in mind when he spoke of this, but it applies just as well today right here in the USA.

This is perhaps the most monumental, brazen attempt I've seen on the part of a public official in my lifetime to tell a falsehood that is so monumentally big, that it stuns the audience into accepting it as truth. Cheney knows for a fact that his new position on the war in no way squares with his old position. I don't think he's so accomplished a "double-thinker" that he's actually obliterating the truth in his own mind until he needs to recall it later(I think he saves that job for his boss.) So Cheney knows exactly what he's doing(which I suppose could make it either better or worse, depending on how you look at it.)

``The suggestion is clearly there by Mr. Duelfer that Saddam had used the program in such a way that he had bought off foreign governments and was building support among them to take the sanctions down,'' Cheney said.
That being the case, there was no reason to wait to invade Iraq to give inspectors more time to do their work, Cheney said.

Let's make sure we're on the same page with the VP here. The war in Iraq was justified because:

1. Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was working on a nuclear program with which to threaten the United States, and he had connections to terrorists.
2. No, it was because, although he didn't have WMDs, he was still an evil dictator who at least wanted nuclear weapons and had connection to terrorists.
3. No, it was because even though he had no WMDs, and had made no real effort to acquire nuclear weapons, he was still an evil dictator and he still maybe had connections to terrorists.
4. No, even though he had no WMDs, made no effort to acquire nuclear weapons, and had no connections to terrorists, he was still an evil dictator.
5. No, it was because he wanted to take the sanctions down.

If you're thinking "Wait...what? Where did that last one come from?" then join the rest of us.

And if you read very closely, you'll see that not only was it necessary to invade Iraq, but there was actully no reason to wait. There was no reason to give the inspectors more time...because there were no WMDs to be found anyway! They didn't need more time to find what wasn't there, so we had every right to invade when we did...right?

Let's get to the point. The rationale for the war has collapsed utterly. No vestige of the argument that they made before the invasion is left to justify the war, other than that Saddam was a brutal dictator (which neither they nor the American people really cared all that much about.) Cheney knows it. Rumsfeld knows it. Rice knows it. Bush probably doesn't know it. But if they can stun you into not thinking about it until after November 2nd, it doesn't really matter, does it?