So while GWB was in Cleveland on the 22nd; and he was spreadin’ lies!

Emphasis mine…

Perhaps most on target was an elderly gentleman who cited what he said were the three main reasons for going to war in Iraq — WMD, Iraq’s ties to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists and the alleged purchase of nuclear material from Niger — and then noted dryly that all three of these rationales turned out to be false.

“How do we restore confidence that Americans may have in their leaders and to be sure that the information they are getting now is correct?” he asked the president.

How indeed? “That’s a great question,” began Bush by way of dissembling. “First, just if I may correct a misperception. I don’t think we ever said — at least I know I didn’t say — that there was a direct connection between Sept. 11 and Saddam Hussein.”

Really? So when he said in his May 1, 2003, “Mission Accomplished” speech on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln that “we have removed an ally of al Qaeda,” he meant a different gang with the same name as the one blamed for the attack on the World Trade Center twin towers and Pentagon? It is his way of finessing the firm conclusion of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission that Hussein was an opponent of al Qaeda and never an ally. Yet that didn’t stop Bush from again on Monday insisting that “the central front on the war on terror is Iraq.”

Even better, Crooks and Liars has some video for ya, with a clip from SOTU 2003 that, for all intents and purposes, proves George Walker Bush lied to the crowd in Cleveland this past Wednesday.

Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.