AUSTIN, Texas -- I rarely find fault with Washington journalist
Josh Marshall and his thoughtful Blog "Talking Points Memo," but I beg to
differ on this occasion.
"My God," writes Marshall, "when they say down the memory hole,
they ain't kiddin'! There now seems to be a secret competition -- perhaps it
was announced and I just didn't hear it -- for the Iraq-hawk who can come up
with the most ingenious, Orwellian, up-is-down rewriting of the history of
the year-long lead-up to the Iraq war."
Marshall goes on to discuss a few entrants in the secret contest
but then votes, prematurely I believe, to award the palm to Bill Safire of
The New York Times. Safire's recent column about "hyping the 'hoax' charge"
is the most elegant of its kind: Suddenly those who ask, "So where are these
weapons of mass destruction we went to war to over?" are the problem.
In Safire's parallel universe, the problem is not that we're not
finding weapons of mass destruction -- which means either we were lied to by
the Bush administration or there was a massive intelligence failure. No,