Yes, that’s old news. Old news that is to everyone except bush sycophants, toadies, neocon opportunists and Joe Lieberman (but I repeat myself). But bush actually said it today. That is he said it right after he used the very kind of sentence construction he and his ilk have used repeatedly to reinforce the belief that, by golly, Iraq was involved in 9/11.

Here’s the money quote: [my emphasis]

BUSH: The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East.

QUESTION: What did Iraq have to do with it?

BUSH: What did Iraq have to do with what?

QUESTION: The attack on the World Trade Center.

BUSH: Nothing. Except it’s part of — and nobody has suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack. Iraq was a — Iraq — the lesson of September 11th is take threats before they fully materialize, Ken. Nobody’s ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq.

Look carefully at those two statements in bold for a moment. Literally none of the progressive blogs I read have commented on the substance of those two statements, not a one, and I find that passing strange. This peculiar dependence on very specific sentence construction, especially from someone supposedly so much of an idiot that he cannot compose a complete sentence in answer to a basic question, is very telling because it is exactly the excuse that is used by Cheney and Bush and all the supporters of the war and critics of the progressive blogs.

“No one said Saddam ordered the attacks”, “No one said Iraq attacked us”, “No one said the hijackers were operating on orders from Iraq”. Wonderful stuff except that it doesn’t address the very real thing this administration has done literally from the earliest times after 9/11 and what Bush very specifically does in his answer to the question. He leads off his answer with this The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East, as does Cheney and all other administration officials when it comes to the subject of Iraq.

I don’t know what I find more amazing, that he can literally think this isn’t the same as blaming Iraq for 9/11 (thus his faux outrage) or that his phony excuse “nobody said he ordered it” is actually still accepted by anyone with more brain cells than an amoeba (which apparently is still about 30% of the country and most Republican politicians and all rightie bloggers).

Yet we will continue to hear this, as well as other carefully crafted excuses. It is all bullshit. This adminstration has literally used every opportunity it can to use the name “Saddam Hussein” or “Iraq” in the same paragraph or even sentence as “9/11″ or “Al Qaeda” or “terror”.

This is not unlike some arrogant 12 year old who plays with matches and while lighting a field of grass on fire starts a fire which burns down a subdivision. When questioned on it his excuse is “I never lit those houses on fire”…no, he just started the fire that burned them down.

What is really sickening is that it is taking 5 years for Americans to really grok this and that our media has still not really glommed on to the reality of how badly they’ve been played.