Ay carumba:

Rep. Paul Kanjorski described how, prior to the vote, he and several other representatives were ushered into the Roosevelt Room in the White House and given a 90-minute, highly classified briefing by then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and CIA Director George Tenant.

"They told us all kind of things. That we were under a threat and their information was as complete as possible and they (Iraq) had weapons of mass destruction" he said.

Kanjorski was not terribly impressed with the briefing. Within two hours he received a call from the White House, asking if he had any further questions. Kanjorski said he that to enter into a preemptive war, he had to be convinced the threat is imminent. And he wasn't convinced.

So he was asked to return for another briefing the next morning.

In it, he was shown large pictures of a plane "that looked like a mosquito." Kanjorski was told these were called UAVs — unmanned aeronautical vehicles, the highest black-box weapons we have, and they (the Iraqis) have 1,000 of them, and they can deliver weapons of mass destruction. That included a plane that could spray chemical and biological materials.

He was told the intelligence agency had incontrovertible evidence of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. "I'm a lawyer" he said. "Use the phrase 'incontrovertible evidence' and you've got my attention. It was impressive."

and:

Kanjorski said he went to see Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), a retired Marine colonel. Murtha, said Kanjorski, "turned white" when told about the drones; Murtha, a former intelligence officer, believed that such information was classified.

Several years later, Kanjorski said he learned that the pictures were "a god-damned lie," apparently taken by CIA photographers in the desert in the southwest of the U.S. The drone story itself had already been disproved, although not many major media carried that story.

We knew this, of course. But it still shocks the senses to picture our supposedly wise tribunes oohing and aahing at a cartoonish "Dr. Evil" slideshow. Given this display, I'm really surprised the Democrats managed to parse through Bush's dire Social Security propaganda.

As Jim Henley points out, we sometimes forget that most politicians are glorified panhandlers with barely enough wits about them to breathe.