One Piece of Evidence

One of the stupider ideas being transmitted directly from Grover Norquist´s brain into the mouths of the usual right wing idiots is that the Niger nuke thing was just one piece of evidence out of volumes, or something. I wish some of them would actually tell me what those volumes of evidence were. I suspect they can´t. Eric Alterman says it best:

It is almost too ironic to point out, for instance, that when the administration (in the form of Rice, Tenet, Cheney, and Powell) attempts to pooh-pooh the Niger lie by saying it was “technically correct” — they did not have sexual relations with that country — or was just one small piece of a larger case, that virtually every aspect of their case was a lie. The WMD threat was a lie. The al-Qaida connection was a lie. The promise of democracy and human rights was a lie. And as today’s front page Washington Post story (see above) indicates, they got stuck with the stupid Niger tale because everything they had been saying about nukes was a lie, too. “But a review of speeches and reports, plus interviews with present and former administration officials and intelligence analysts, suggests that between Oct. 7, when President Bush made a speech laying out the case for military action against Hussein, and Jan. 28, when he gave his State of the Union address, almost all the other evidence had either been undercut or disproved by U.N. inspectors in Iraq.” (And this to say nothing of the apparently clueless Bush who somehow forgot that it was he who ended the inspections regime, not Saddam.)