The President's lies and misrepresentations

The President responds to the latest NIE report, in which 16 separate intelligence agencies concluded that Iran halted work on acquiring nuclear weapons in 2003.

"I view this report as a warning signal that they had the program, they halted the program," Bush said. "The reason why it's a warning signal is they could restart it."

So if it stops raining, put your baseball bat and glove back down, kids. Doesn't mean you can go out an play. It's just a warning that it might start raining again soon. The President has a knack for absurdly inappropriate interpretations of inconvenient facts and data. Remember when he insisted that military operations in Iraq were obviously succeeding because U.S. casualties were rising? Remember what Bush said back when inspection teams concluded that Iraq possessed no Weapons of Mass Destructions, either chemical, nuclear or biological?

We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them.

It was a similar attempt by the President to look the world straight in the face and tell us all that the moon was made of cheese. Of course, intelligence agencies had concluded no such thing, and were instead inclined to believe that that the mobile laboratories to which Bush was referring were not chemical weapons labs, but rather mobile facilities for the production of hydrogen gas (probably used to fill balloons which were used as targets in anti-aircraft gun training exercises.) So he was lying then too, just as he's lying today.

Reports are now surfacing that the Bush administration kept this NIE assessment under wraps for over a year, even as the President ceaselessly belched apocalyptic rhetoric about the threat of Iran's Nuclear program.

But at least he wasn't lying about sex, right?