As imperfect as his assumptions sometimes are, I yield to Arlo regarding election politics. I can only contribute blindly incautious, fist-pounding rage. Or, to put it another way, I know only enough to be able to recognize that my political acumen is powered almost exclusively by personal desire at the expense of cold reason. The counterintuitive consequence of this is that I am prone to be disloyal to candidates who best represent my views. Ideology, as it turns out, has always been dependent on communal support (or at least shared values). My own utter absence of ideology has resulted in my passions overtaking my intellect; making me only somewhat more capable of rational judgment than, say, a turd. Like the candidates themselves, I’m likely to want to believe something so darn much that I convince myself that it’s actually true (i.e., Howard Dean will not only win the nomination, but he will so brutalize Bush in the November election that he [Bush] will petition some backward African dictatorship for asylum). I really believe this crap. Which is why I demure in such discourse to more level heads. See where I’m heading with this? The President said this:

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.

Well, this just wasn’t true. What are the chances that, like me, Bush just wanted a thing to be true so darn much he just went on ahead and believed it? Or was it just “bad intelligence”? Some retarded Captain of the 75th Exploitation Task Force (XTF) who picked up a rusted muffler and said, “Heck, boys! I think we gots here a tank of boo-bonik plague! Oops, I think my weenus is leaking…”. Yeah. Bad intelligence. Now, since we have come to expect erumpent bullshit from this President, I doubt that the political ramifications of his limpid lies will be very severe…but let’s stop kidding ourselves about “bad intelligence”. On “speaking truth to power”, a certain dude has famously said:

…power already knows the truth. They don't need to hear it from us. Secondly, it's a waste of time. Furthermore, it's the wrong audience. You have to speak truth to the people who will dismantle and overthrow and constrain power.

I think in this case, it’s fair to say that “power already knows the truth”.