Is it 2009 yet?

Generally, comments on stories like this from the White House almost seem almost futile, aside from the reminder that, as the Onion put it in 2002, "They say people get the government they deserve, but I don't recall knife-raping any retarded nuns".

Yet there are two extremely disturbing things here. The first is, Bush is presently gladly declassifying documents from the last 3 years of our ongoing "war on terror" to say, "look, the terrerrists could attack!", even while historians still can't get access to various documents (the Iran-Contra affair comes to mind) because of "national security". So the administration is giving the message that documents are only to be declassified when they aid the administration in its ongoing, corrupt war, but any actual declassification for historical research is not going to happen. No surprise here, but it's still infuriating.

Secondly, let's pretend that Bush's contention that bin Laden admitted to wanting to set up base in Iraq in 2005 is true (and it very well may not be). That would never have happened had we not still been there in the first place. This isn't a support for Hussein - 2005 was two years after Bush went to war in Iraq. Had we never gone to war, or had we actually had a plan for stability after we got in, then it wouldn't have been so unstable for bin Laden to set up camp in the first place (again, IF we accept this claim as true). But of course, this doesn't matter to Bush - it's just one more in the increasingly awful and baseless attempts to tie bin Laden to Iraq any way the administration can.