So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late...

I've been watching the Congressional Democrats rant and rave about BushCo "Lies," "Taking us to war under false pretenses," "doctored intelligence," and the like for some time now. This meme started at the fringes (MoveOn and People for the American Way, let's say) and was easy to ignore while it was a fringe activity. But somewhere around two or three months ago, mainstream Democratic pols began to fall for the "say it loud enough and often enough and people will believe anything" theory. The Democratic chorus that increased in volume with the Libby indictment reached a crescendo late last week and is continuing almost as we speak (so to say).

They obviously don't understand there's a war on and words have meaning, especially to our enemy. Or maybe they DO understand. I remember Viet Nam vividly, and the loudest of the limo-liberals do, too. We're the same age, after all. Glenn Reynolds recently murmured "treason." Radical-right voices have been shouting it for a long time. I'm not ready to go that far, yet. I've been waiting for rational moderate voices, e.g., the Gang of 14, to step up and say "Enough! There's a war on, fer Crissakes!" I'm beginning to think it ain't gonna happen.

Another thing I've wondered about is why have the Republicans just sat on their hands and let Howard Dean, Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid rave on unanswered. Well, the gloves came off this week. Dubya gave two great speeches in the past week, one on Monday. But tonight Cheney gave a corker! The first three paragraphs lay it out (emphasis mine):

Let me thank the good people of Frontiers of Freedom - George Landrith, Kerri Houston, Al Lee - for bringing us all together this evening. I see many good friends in the room, including current and former office holders. It's a pleasure to see all of you. I'm sorry that we couldn't be joined by Senators Harry Reid, John Kerry, or Jay Rockefeller. They were unable to attend due to a prior lack of commitment.

As most of you know, I have spent a lot of years in public service, and first came to work in Washington, D.C. back in the late 1960s. I know what it's like to operate in a highly charged political environment, in which the players on all sides of an issue feel passionately and speak forcefully. In such an environment people sometimes lose their cool, and yet in Washington you can ordinarily rely on some basic measure of truthfulness and good faith in the conduct of political debate. But in the last several weeks we have seen a wild departure from that tradition. And the suggestion that's been made by some U. S. senators that the President of the United States or any member of this Administration purposely misled the American people on pre-war intelligence is one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city.

Some of the most irresponsible comments have, of course, come from politicians who actually voted in favor of authorizing force against Saddam Hussein. These are elected officials who had access to the intelligence, and were free to draw their own conclusions. They arrived at the same judgment about Iraq's capabilities and intentions that was made by this Administration and by the previous Administration. There was broad-based, bipartisan agreement that Saddam Hussein was a threat ... that he had violated U.N. Security Council Resolutions ... and that, in a post-9/11 world, we couldn't afford to take the word of a dictator who had a history of WMD programs, who had excluded weapons inspectors, who had defied the demands of the international community, who had been designated an official state sponsor of terror, and who had committed mass murder. Those are facts. What we're hearing now is some politicians contradicting their own statements and making a play for political advantage in the middle of a war.

It's about time. I just hope the Republicans haven't waited too long. It remains to be seen if we'll achieve unity, which is a polite way of saying "if the Democrats will shut up," but the stakes are higher than I've ever seen in MY lifetime. And I'm old.

Update: Lots more in the same vein here, and better said, to boot.