I cannot recommend highly enough Norman Podhoretz‘s recent essay “Who Is Lying About Iraq?” (available in html and pdf). It is a singular word of sane analysis among a din of media reporting that merely parrots anti-war talking points. I have been writing about this topic a great deal lately because opponents of the Iraq War have been making hay out of Scooter Libby’s indictment (read here, here, here, and here). They have used the indictment to slander President Bush by claiming he lied in order to dupe the nation into going to war.

I am not surprised at the superficiality of an editorial in today’s New York Times. The editors at the Times are notoriously predictable in their knee-jerk defense of secularist liberal values. Unfortunately, this fact often means that they do not engage the real issues that are at stake in a given debate. In the editorial “The Democrats and Judge Alito,” the Times once again shows its penchant for missing the point. The gist of the piece argues that “there is reason to believe that Judge Alito could do significant damage to values Democrats have long stood for.” It goes on to complain that “Alito showed as a federal appeals court…

Photo: Charles Dharapak/Associated Press President Bush has been mute for far too long about the baseless charges being leveled at him by his political opponents. This silence has been very frustrating for those of us who have supported this president’s war policy. The silence on his part has given the appearance that everything that the critics of the war are saying is true and that there never was any legitimate basis for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Today in a speech marking Veterans Day, the President finally decided to step up to the plate and take a whack at the unfounded allegations that his critics have made against the case…