THE BIG LIE AND THE LITTLE PREVARICATIONS

Will America stand still for the corruption of its democracy? That's the real question voters are about to answer -- whether they will accept The Big Lie or repudiate it, whether they will go along with The Liar or throw him out of office.

On Nov. 2, voters will have their chance to redeem America's reputation for democratic principles. If they do not, if they submit to The Big Lie, if they let themselves be swayed by The Liar and his minions, who've upped the ante by amplifying The Big Lie in the debates and on the stump, they will have forfeited any claim to innocence. It's not as if the voters haven't been warned. They've been told time and again of The Big Lie, today more than ever.

In this morning's lead editorial, "Weapons That Weren't There," The Washington Post says:

The new report from the Iraq Survey Group has confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt what most people have assumed for the past year: At the time of the 2003 U.S. invasion, Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction, and most of its programs to produce them were dormant.

Most people except our prevaricatin' prez, that is.

In more than a year of investigation, the survey group found "no evidence to suggest concerted efforts to restart" the Iraqi nuclear weapons program that had been halted in 1991; there were "no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions" after 1991; and there was "no direct evidence that Iraq, after 1996, had plans for a new BW [biological weapons] program."

Which means there was no "imminent threat," no "grave and gathering danger," no reason for the rush to war in Iraq.

"The 1,000-page report by Charles A. Duelfer, head of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group weapons-hunting teams, is the most definitive account yet of Iraq's long-defunct weapons programs," the Los Angeles Times reports.

The Iraqi regime had no formal, written strategy to revive the banned programs after sanctions, and no staff or infrastructure in place to do so, the investigators found. The report said that Hussein's illicit-weapons capability was "essentially destroyed" after the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and was never rebuilt. It said Hussein considered the U.N. sanctions "an economic stranglehold" that in effect curbed his ability to build or develop weapons in the ensuing 12 years.

How many times must it be said? For our prevaricatin' prez, never enough times. He prefers The Big Lie. Yesterday, on the same day the report was released -- the official report he has claimed he's been waiting for, because it would settle the issue -- our prevaricatin' prez once again declared that Saddam Hussein was about to attack the United States and, by implication, had a hand in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Retooling his stump speech in Michigan, he asserted:

In our debate, Senator Kerry said that removing Saddam Hussein was a mistake because the threat was not imminent," Mr. Bush said. "The problem with this approach is obvious: if America waits until a threat is at our doorstep, it might be too late to save lives. Tyrants and terrorists will not give us polite notice before they launch an attack on our country. I refuse to stand by while dangers gather."

He also refuses to acknowledge reality. And it's not just the reality of what's happening in Iraq. It's what's happening here at home.

Read today's report by Danny Hakim and Eric Lichtblau, "After Convictions, the Undoing of a U.S. Terror Prosecution." It tells about the notorious Justice Department investigation of the so-called "sleeper operational combat cell" in Detroit immediately after 9/11, which "received worldwide attention as part of a nationwide terrorist dragnet." Read about how the investigation was botched; how indictments were brought on trumped up evidence in the first place.

Read about the Justice Department's lies and incompetence; how Attorney General John Ashcroft, knowing full well that the department had "no evidence" linking the presumed terrorists to 9/11, "nevertheless, at a press on Oct. 31, 2001 ... said the men were 'suspected of having knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks' before they happened." Read about how "the statement generated a fresh round of news coverage, but it was baseless," and also how Ashcroft had so little respect for courtroom justice that he violated a gag order by the judge in the case not to make statements about it.

Read how the prevaricatin' prez himself said the Detroit case had "thwarted terrorists" as part of several critical investigations around the country. Read about how senior Justice Department officials knew along that their case was so weak it wouldn't stand up to scrutiny but went ahead anyway, and how "officials in Washington even floated the idea of declaring the suspects 'enemy combatants'" so as "to impose extraordinary custody measures," thus abrogating the due process of law.

Read about how cynical Justice Department officials felt little or no obligation to tell the truth, not just in plagizarizing parts of the indictment itself -- they copied them verbatim from a scholarly article about Islamic fundamentialist -- but in relishing press misinformation. "I'm enjoying speculation that the Detroit and Seattle cases are linked and part of an orchestrated nationwide enforcement program," a Justice Department official, who was supervising the case, said in his congratulations to the prosecutors. "The press gives us much more credit than we deserve, not knowing that the timing was largely happenstance."

Finally, read about how the Justice Department's head of counter-terrorism wrote in a six-page memorandum: "The weaknesses in this case reflect the fact that what was a fledgling scheme was disrupted at an early stage." Which sounds uncannily like our prevaricatin' prez's fantastical claim that the current chaos in Iraq is the result not of imperial hubris and administrative incompetence but of a military victory that came earlier than anticipated. It was too swift and too successful, he tells us.

"Look, the decision's been made that the president just isn't going to get into an introspective mode of 'we could have done this better,'" an administration official who sat in on many of the Bush campaign's strategy meetings told The New York Times. And "one of Mr. Bush's closest aides" said that "it's more important that he shows he is going to stick with it, not look back, and make this work."

Are Americans really going to stand still for all of this? Are they going to accept The Big Lie and the steady drip of prevarications from cynical liars desperate to prop it up?