Billmon on Bush and the Big Lie re Saddam-Al Qaeda link: "What the gang seems to be doing here is testing the outside of the Orwellian envelope a little bit, to see if they can get away with such a flagrant display of 'up-is-downism.' I don't think I've ever seen such an utterly naked ploy from these guys before. Perhaps they've stumbled, wittingly or unwittingly, across the same insight Joseph Goebbels had all those years ago: The bigger the lie, the more likely it is to be accepted, since the audience will be reluctant to believe its leaders would tell them such a monstrous untruth. (In this case I have to assume the audience in question is the GOP faithful and that tiny sliver of undecided voters in the middle. Everybody on our side of the partisan divide already realizes there is no lie too big for this administration to tell, and they know we know.)"

Billmon on Bush and the Big Lie re Saddam-Al Qaeda link: "What the gang seems to be doing here is testing the outside of the Orwellian envelope a little bit, to see if they can get away with such a flagrant display of 'up-is-downism.' I don't think I've ever seen such an utterly naked ploy from these guys before. Perhaps they've stumbled, wittingly or unwittingly, across the same insight Joseph Goebbels had all those years ago: The bigger the lie, the more likely it is to be accepted, since the audience will be reluctant to believe its leaders would tell them such a monstrous untruth. (In this case I have to assume the audience in question is the GOP faithful and that tiny sliver of undecided voters in the middle. Everybody on our side of the partisan divide already realizes there is no lie too big for this administration to tell, and they know we know.)"