Condoleezza Rice: The Hardest Working Woman In Show Business

Some people are able to take the weekend off from their jobs. Sadly, when you're Condoleezza Rice and your job is to lie about everything, you often have to work on Sundays. But Rice doesn't use that as an excuse to slack off and not lie as much as she does on a weekday. Indeed, on weekends she usually lies twice as hard.

Such was the case today:

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said [today] it is still unclear whether Iraq attempted to procure tens of thousands of aluminum tubes for a nuclear weapons program or a conventional rocket program, despite conclusions by the Senate intelligence committee and U.N. investigators that the tubes could not be used in any nuclear program.

"As I understand it, people are still debating this," Rice said on ABC's "This Week" program. "And I'm sure they will continue to debate it."

Uh huh. Yes, there's still debate about this, in the same sense there's still debate about whether George Bush is a giant space lizard in disguise. But... the great preponderance of evidence points in one direction. And generally speaking, someone who doesn't feel comfortable coming down firmly on the "George Bush: Not Giant Space Lizard" side of the issue shouldn't be National Security Advisor.

Then there's this:

In 2002, Rice had said that the tubes were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs," adding that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

But, as reported by The Washington Post more than a year ago, the internal debate among intelligence analysts was intense, with the experts at the Department of Energy who specialize in uranium enrichment adamant that the tubes were not suitable for a nuclear program. They argued that the tubes were intended for Iraqi rockets.

Administration officials at the time did not acknowledge that debate, though Rice acknowledged yesterday she was aware of it. "I knew that there was a dispute," she said. "I actually didn't really know the nature of the dispute."

What could the dispute possibly be about EXCEPT whether or not the tubes were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs"? Did Rice think the disagreement was about whether the tubes were part of the giant space lizard's George Bush disguise?

As I've said before, we may not be able to get a government that tells the truth, but at least we should elect people who put more effort into their lies.