Shame ||: "Odyssey of Frustration"

The Washington Post’s Barton Gellman continues his series on the amazing unseriousness of our “search” for WMDs in Iraq.

Like Kevin Drum, I wonder if there is anything in the world that the Bushistas take seriously, aside from their own pursuit of power and the good life.

How long will Bush go on like this, lying about the most serious of issues, and paying no price for it? Clearly, if Iraq did have significant WMDs, Bush did not believe they did; the resources directed to the search for these weapons had but a miserable shadow of adequacy. If he was seriously concerned that Iraq would give WMDs to terrorists, if that was—as he said—our casus belli, would not finding and locking down the WMDs be the primary mission of the war? The only plausible explanation for what Gellman has reported is a lack of attention to the problem at the highest levels. Which, if Bush was telling the truth about why we went to war, would be an incomprehensible dereliction of duty. He lied.

So, given all of that, my question is: where does it end? Is there anything that Bush could do that would shake the press from its coma, and make them question the “honest but simpleminded” storyline that has given him a free pass to dissemble at will? What will it take? Another war? Another 2 million jobs lost? What?

Filed under: politics/war