The Lie That Wouldn't Die

Last month, as you may recall, a few Republicans (most notably Sen. Rick Santorum, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, and Fox News' Sean Hannity) tried one last-ditch effort to convince Americans that we had found the Iraqi WMDs that the President assured us Saddam was hiding when we invaded the country three years ago. Santorum waved around a classified report he insisted was proof of this. As he was almost immediately corrected that the weapons the report referred to were degraded, discarded munitions predating the first Gulf War, and even as the Defense Department disavowed his 'findings', Santorum and the others barely blinked an eye. We had found the WMDs- that was their story and they were sticking to it.

In my blog entry on that, I stated at the beginning that I was "mostly posting this for posterity because in the coming months and years we can expect the right-wing to cling to the lie that we found the WMDs in Iraq that we were looking for". And cling they have. Sean Hannity, for one, is still bragging about the found WMDs and ranting about the liberal media that has been covering this fact up. Why, they even got the Pentagon involved in the coverup!

More depressing, ignoring Hannity since he's a predictable partisan, is the number of average Americans who still believe the lies and spin used to sell the war. Numerous polls still show, for example, that a high number still believe that Iraq was responsible for 9/11 and/or that the hijackers were Iraqi. Now, in light of the Santorum report, the conservative Washington Times reports that-

Half of Americans now say Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the United States invaded the country in 2003 -- up from 36 percent last year, a Harris poll finds. Pollsters deemed the increase both "substantial" and "surprising" in light of persistent press reports to the contrary in recent years.

My translation: Blueduck37 deemed the increase "intellectually depressing" but "not super surprising" in light of persistent spin and propaganda in recent years.

Finally, Alex Koppelman at Huffington Post looks at this poll and those praising it:
How The Lies About WMD Continue To Work