Candidate Null Set

Mitt Romney wins the Lie of the Night award, answering the question "Was it a mistake to invade Iraq?"

Well, the question is, kind of, a non sequitur, if you will. What I mean by that — or a null set — that is that if you're saying let's turn back the clock and Saddam Hussein had opening up his country to IAEA inspectors and they'd come in and they'd found that there were no weapons of mass destruction, had Saddam Hussein therefore not violated United Nations resolutions, we wouldn't be in the conflict we're in. But he didn't do those things, and we knew what we knew at the point we made the decision to get in.

Um. Saddam Hussein did let the inspectors in. Hans Blix was in Iraq right up until a few days before the war, when George Bush ordered him and his team out. And they weren't finding anything.

This is the "big lie" about the Iraq war, and I'm sure most Americans don't even know the truth here. As Matthew Yglesias notes regarding Giuliani's suggestion that Iraq is "part of the overall terrorist war on the United States," the Republicans are going to lie with impunity in this next election, and the Democrats need to be ready for it.

Unfortunately for Democrats, the way political reporters in practice cover this stuff is much better exemplified by my other colleague Marc Ambinder who merely notes that "Giuliani linked Iraq to the broader war on terror and kept accusing Democrats of burying their heads in the sand."

I don't like it, but that's the way the game is played. What I'd really like to see, though, is the politician with enough confidence in his or her own command of the national security issue to just shoot back as if we live in a sane universe wherein BS like that from Giuliani demonstrates not "toughness" but his unfitness to lead the country.

I don't know if there's anyone out there on the Democratic side willing to challenge that assumption and call out the lies for what they are, but I certainly hope so. It's a smackdown waiting to happen, but it has to be broadcast loudly to drown out the Republican noise machine.

UPDATE: I should also mention that null set is a math term and has absolutely no relevance in Romney's statement. Maybe it means something different on the planet of the Psychlos.