Quoth Dubya to the troops in Qatar:

Day by day, the United States and our coalition partners are making the streets safer for the Iraqi citizens. We also understand that a more just political system will develop when people have food in their stomachs, and their lights work, and they can turn on a faucet and they can find some clean water -- things that Saddam did not do for them.

Except that there was electricity and clean running water in Iraq before the war; it was the disruption of those services which lead to health crises in Basra and elsewhere. And this was well-covered in the press, let alone secret intelligence briefings.

In the Daily Kos, Steve Gilliard argues that Dubya must have been fooling himself about Iraq's WMD programs because he's not acting now like someone expecting to get caught. But this whopper was well known to be false before he uttered it. Either he just doesn't care, or he's convinced that he won't get caught. Meanwhile, it's worth noting that many of the statements regarding Iraqi WMD, like the claims that they had munitions ready for use, were almost certainly false, whatever Dubya may or may not have believed when he spoke. If they existed in sufficient quantities for battlefield deployment, we'd have found them by now; instead we're looking for hints and scraps.

What is to be done? John Dean has an already well-blogged commentary on FindLaw drawing up a preliminary case for impeachment based on the statements regarding arms. If we were operating in the Republic that the authors of The Federalist had in mind, it would be a slam dunk. But that would be a republic in which Congressmen acted first for their states' interest and for their own prerogatives as Congressmen, and as members of a political party second, if at all. Checks and balances were supposed to work because Congress was supposed to be jealous of executive power. Instead we have a Congress dominated by the so-called "Republican" party, which values loyalty to faction above all. There may be nothing left to do but vote the bastards out, if we still can.

Speech quote via comments in the daily Kos