President Bush and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad War Lies:
Let's have some fun with the search engine for the Center for Public Integrity's War Card, a mind-numbing, heart-sickening, stomach-churning aggregation of all the lies just the higher-ups in the Bush administration spewed in the build-up to and while fanning the flames of the Iraq War. Let's start with the scary adjectives:

Plug in the word "horrible," and you get fun quotes like:
President Bush in October 2002: Iraq "has a horrible history of striking without warning."

Ari Fleischer, asked if the White House was using propaganda to "educate" the public about Iraq, in March 2003: "I think it's part of describing the horrible reality that Saddam Hussein is putting his people through."

Paul Wolfowitz, in May 2003: "I mean there is no question the regime was a horrible thing." And in June 2003: "[T]his regime was a horrible abuser of its own people and that there is no question the Iraqi people are far better off with that regime gone."

Howzabout for variation, the word "horror"? Here's Dick Cheney, a man who knows a thing or two about horror, in January 2003: "[I]t would take just one vial, one canister, one crate to bring a day of horror to our nation unlike any we have ever known."

And here's a cool one, from Colin Powell, talking comparing the motherfucking Holocaust to Hussein's brutality, in June 2003: "The full horror has yet to be exposed, but every day brings more evidence of the regime's crimes against humanity, and those responsible will be held to account."

Damn, this is fun. It's like a tour through our collective derangement. It's like a whole clip full of "told-you-so" bullets to put in our Glocks of sad recognition.

Here's some "terrible" shit:
Condoleezza Rice in February 2002: "It remains a dangerous regime, and it remains a regime determined to acquire these terrible weapons."

From that same month, here's one of the best quotes, from President Bush: "People who love freedom understand that we cannot allow nations that aren't transparent, nations with a terrible history, nations that are so dictatorial they're willing to starve their people, we can't allow them to mate up with terrorist organizations." So, not only no gay marriage, but no terrible mating, either. Consistency, thy middle initial is "W."

And to the U.N. in his great and mighty speech on 9/12 in 2002, Bush said, "With every step the Iraqi regime takes toward gaining and deploying the most terrible weapons, our own options to confront that regime will narrow." At this point, "terrible weapons" became the operative phrase, used by Condi, Wolfie, and Colin.

It ain't even worth talking about how many times "terror" appears.

You could go all day with this. Sometimes you find big shitloads of irony in the simplest of searches. "Torture," for instance, reveals Colin Powell promising in March 2003, "[W]e have quite a bit of experience in not only conducting successful military operations but rebuilding a better society afterwards where the Iraqi people can be free of fear, free of torture, free of the kinds of crimes that Saddam Hussein has committed against his own people." Or President Bush, already in hominah-hominah justification mode in January 2004, saying, "Iraq's torture chambers would still be filled with victims, terrified and innocent."

Or what George Bush's moral standards are: "We believe targeting innocent civilians for murder is always and everywhere wrong" (June 10, 2002).

And what about the word "lies"? Shall we get meta here? Ari Fleischer, a man who, even if truth was an armless war orphan who had seen both her parents disemboweled and hung by their own intestines, would bend it over his lectern and rape it in front of the gathered press (who would dutifully report that truth was asking for it with her seductive tears), blustered in September 2002: "Iraq also accused President Bush of engaging in lies and falsehoods." Or George Bush, describing, one imagines, Saddam Hussein, in that same month: "This is a man who continually lies. This is a man who does not know the truth. This is a man who is a threat to peace.

Or Rumsfeld, who, when in hell, and perhaps before, deserves to be force-fed an awful mush made from the bones of dead civilians until his gut ruptures, outraged by what Hussein would dare say, remarked in February 2003, "I mean, he said that Secretary Powell's words tomorrow are going to be lies. He says that the photographs that will be shown will be doctored. That's what he does. That's what he does. And then the world's press spreads it around the world as though it's true. It's utter—it's just a continuous pattern. This is a case of the local liar coming up again and people repeating what he said and forgetting to say that he never—almost never—rarely tells the truth."

It is nauseating, not just because, of course, they were wrong, but because, in almost every case, they knew they were wrong. The War Card is a catalog of the road signs on our American path to damnation. It should be stapled to the head of every complicit Judith Miller-esque reporter. It should be enshrined next to the goddamn Declaration of Independence, the yin and yang of how power is dealt with in this country.

By the way, the word "penis" does not appear. Neither "vagina." Nor do "cock" or "pussy." Yet, appropriately enough, "dick" seems only to reference Cheney. "Cunt" is nowhere to be found in the words, but, indeed, it's all over the document.