It’s the subject of this week’s cartoon. It’s also happening more quickly than a weekly cartoonist with a longish lead time can keep up with. The newest effort is the subtle introduction of the word “program”:
“Iraq had a weapons program,” Bush told reporters during a meeting of his Cabinet. “Intelligence throughout the decade shows they had a weapons program. I am absolutely convinced that with time, we’ll find out they did have a weapons program,” Bush said.
Sorry, I don’t remember the administration warning us about a potential program — it seems to me they were telling us that Saddam had the weapons and by god was ready to use them if we didn’t act right now.
While I’m on the topic, a shout-out is owed to Billmon, whose post on pre-war declarations of certainty provided some (though not all — I do do a little research on mine own occasionally) of the original quotes altered for said cartoon. (I also saw a couple of Billmon’s quotes being used on Meet the Press this weekend — is big media actually beginning to pay attention to the left side of the blogosphere?)
Update: via Counterspin, I am led to this entry at Needlenose (a new blog to me) on the same topic. (Personal note: Needlenose also mentions Josh Marshall’s and Atrios’ role in the downfall of Trent Lott. It’s not a big deal, but I’m not sure why this blog never gets any mention when that one comes up. It did, after all, play a small but important role in the affair: due to an alert reader of ours, the third recorded instance of Trent Lott’s wistfulness for a Thurmond presidency was made public, an embarrassment which arguably turned out to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. I chuckled when I saw a Fox News analyst speculating at the time that the DNC must have had an army of interns going over old footage of Lott to find that clip. Of course, even when MSNBC — whose “scoop” on that third bit of tape only occurred because I happened to know somebody working there at the time — even when they were discussing the role of the blogs, in the context of having just aired the tape to which this site had alerted them — they proceeded to credit, yes, Josh Marshall…)