Pants on Fire

Authored by Michael Pate on July 19th, 2004 at 11:15 AM

Dave has two questions for William Safire.

What about the lie that there were WMDs in Iraq? And what about the lie that al Qaeda was allied with Iraq, that somehow our war in Iraq was part of The War On Terrorism? - Dave Winer

Dave is so quick to use the word lie these days. And so unwilling to cite even the slightest bit of evidence to back up his conclusions. Is he saying that Iraq never had any WMD? A lot of dead Kurds and Iranians would be quick to point out otherwise, were it possible for them to do so. And Iraq had no part in the War on Terror? That would come as a big surprise to Abdul Rahman Yasin and Ramzi Yousef.

If Dave really wants to have a “discourse” on the issue of whether anyone lied about Iraq (besides Joseph Wilson, of course), cool.

So much for the wild charges that Bush manipulated intelligence and lied about weapons of mass destruction. He simply said what was believed by every informed person — including leading members of the Clinton administration before 2001 and Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards in their speeches in October 2002 supporting military action in Iraq. - Michael Barone

But calling someone a liar is not the best way to get it started.