The Norman Podhoretz article that appears to have inspired the GOP to finally fight back against the ridiculous and intellectually dishonest "Bush lied!" Democrat campaign now appears at the Wall Street Journal's free opinion site, OpinionJournal.com. Podhoretz takes the main thrust of a counterargument that has rumbled around the blogosphere in simpler forms and uses the data to stage a devastating rhetorical rebuttal to those Democrats who used the same intelligence in 1998 and 2002 to make themselves look tough.

Podhoretz begins:

Among the many distortions, misrepresentations and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed.

What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon characters, this allegation simply cannot be killed off, no matter what.

Nevertheless, I want to take one more shot at exposing it for the lie that it itself really is. Although doing so will require going over ground that I and many others have covered before, I hope that revisiting this well-trodden terrain may also serve to refresh memories that have grown dim, to clarify thoughts that have grown confused, and to revive outrage that has grown commensurately dulled.

As long as the "Bush lied!" meme stayed on the fringes of the political scene, among the ANSWER and MoveOn crowd that never met a conspiracy it didn't like, the GOP felt comfortable in ignoring it. After all, the last election saw this argument played as a major part of John Kerry's platform, and it not only failed to win the White House, it cost them four seats in the Senate as well.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, their leadership spent the last year drinking the leftover stolen-election Kool-Aid from 2000. They believe that Kerry really won the election last November. The conspiracy theory that the GOP somehow stole Ohio by manipulating precincts under heavy Democratic control leads them to think that their 2004 strategy actually worked -- and all they need to do is act like they really, really believe it for the American electorate to start believing it, too.

It's that irrationality that leads to the debacles of yesterday's appearance by Jay Rockefeller on Fox News. Not only does his assertions that he has no responsibility for his vote supporting the war sound idiotic at best, but he has no answer for his own words in the run-up to the October 2002 authorization vote which sounded much more hysterical about the Saddam threat than anything coming out of the White House. It also provides an opportunity for Rockefeller to create his own news by admitting that he shared government information on war plans with Bashar Assad.

Read all of Podhoretz' excellent and energetic rebuttal.

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