"Weapons of mass destruction program-related activities."

Now doesn't that sound really stupid? Who writes this shit anyway? In a desperate bid to reframe the continuing debate about the validity of the Resident's case for making war upon Iraq, Shrub and Co. have seized upon this laughable and meaningless euphemism to describe the "imminent threat" Iraq was supposed to have posed to the United States.

A year ago there were "nukular weapons" littering the desert, bioweapons of every form lurking in caves and beneath the hoods of "mobile labs." Turns out it was all a fiction, cooked up by Wolfowitz and Cheney to close some unfinished business and seize power in the Middle East in a bid to alter world oil politics.

Remember Colin Powell at the UN, with his show 'n' tell performance, complete with satellite photographs and all of those scary and very specific descriptions of the purpose of those buildings and vehicles? All a lie.

Now the story has undergone another revision. Weapons of mass destruction have gone AWOL, so now "freedom and democracy" were the reasons for going to war, and oh, don't forget the imminent danger of those

"Weapons of mass destruction program-related activities."

Sounds exactly like something Baghdad Bob would have said as bombs were raining down around him and the Iraqi Army was deserting en masse. If any other world leader dared to utter such an absurd phrase, he would have been mocked pitilessly by members of our government and press. Since the empty words fell from the lying lips of our Commander-In-Thief they are taken as gospel by a pliable and lazy media, repeated without any sense of irony at all.

The final twist in this sickening farce is the new Shrub assertion, echoed by all of his cabinet officials (cabinet criminals, say I) on the Sunday media blab fests, that he and all of his cohorts were misled by faulty intelligence and the blame lies with CIA, NSA, and the rest of the alphabet soup crowd. This runs counter to the oft repeated mantra that the blather about armageddon weapons was based on "reliable, comprehensive intelligence." It remains to be seen whether or not George Tenet will attempt a second stumble onto his sword to save the Resident from the hard truth.