The WaPo nails Al Gore’s absurd speech (you know the one that all the ‘moderate’ Democrats were crowing about):
Mr. Gore, who not so long ago was describing Iraq as a “virulent threat in a class by itself,” validated just about every conspiratorial theory of the antiwar left. President Bush, in distorting evidence about the Iraqi threat, was pursuing policies “designed to benefit friends and supporters.” The war was waged “at least partly in order to ensure our continued access to oil.” And it occurred because “false impressions” precluded the nation from conducting a serious debate before the war.
This notion — that we were all somehow bamboozled into war — is part of Mr. Gore’s larger conviction that Mr. Bush has put one over on the nation, and not just with regard to Iraq.
You can see why he might want to think so. Mr. Gore believes, for example, that the Patriot Act represents “a broad and extreme invasion of our privacy rights in the name of terrorism.” But then how to explain that 98 senators — including all four Democratic senators now running for president — voted for it? The president’s economic and environmental policies represent an “ideologically narrow agenda” serving only “powerful and wealthy groups and individuals who manage to work their way into the inner circle.”
But then why do so many other people support those policies? Mr. Gore has an umbrella explanation, albeit one that many Americans might find a tad insulting: “The administration has developed a highly effective propaganda machine to embed in the public mind mythologies. . . . ”
Thus, Mr. Gore maintains, we were all under the “false impression” that Saddam Hussein was “on the verge of building nuclear bombs,” that he was “about to give the terrorists poison gas and deadly germs,” that he was partly responsible for the 9/11 attacks. And because of these “false impressions,” the nation didn’t conduct a proper debate about the war. But there was extensive debate going back many years; last fall and winter the nation debated little else. Mr. Bush took his case to the United Nations. Congress argued about and approved a resolution authorizing war. And the approval did not come, as Mr. Gore and other Democrats now maintain, because people were deceived into believing that Saddam Hussein was an “imminent” threat who had attacked the World Trade Center or was about to do so.
The Washington Post correctly identifies this as nothing more than what Lileks called the arrogant sheeple meme:
If there