Wouldn’t it be nice if Bush would have just taped himself in secret discussions with Cheney, Rove, and Libby, while the quartet sat around discussing how to use classified information to illegally harm Joe Wilson and his wife Valerie.

That would be the smoking gun.

Well.  Take some heart.  Smoking guns are hard to find.  But it looks like the New York Times has found a smoking something, anyway.

[A declassified memo passed to the NYTs] shows that an al-Qaeda official in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained al-Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to this Defense Intelligence Agency document from February 2002.

[The memo] declared that it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, “was intentionally misleading the debriefers” in making claims about Iraqi support for al-Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons, Jehl reports.

All right.  We’ve got smoke.  But the administration wouldn’t be stupid enough to use non-credible information to take us to a war.  Would they?

“The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi’s credibility,” Jehl writes. “Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi’s information as `credible’ evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

“Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that `we’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.'”
A White House spokeswoman said she had no immediate comment on the D.I.A. report.

OMG.  You mean the President knowingly misled us to war???  I can’t believe it.  And even if he did, so what.  It’s not like the American people would want him impeached for such a silly little lie, right?  I mean he wasn’t schlepping an intern after all.

A new poll of likely voters by Zogby International has found that a majority of Americans support Congress considering the impeachment of President Bush if he “did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq,” RAW STORY has learned.

No way.  You mean to tell me that the New York Times is going to publish a story tomorrow that would lead a reader of average intelligence to conclude that the President of the United States of America should be impeached?  Wow.  The sun is rising on America again.