Listening to the local public radio station's superb morning talkshow, Forum, and the topic is Iraq: One Year Later, as is everybody's topic today, seemingly.

[You can listen online here.]

What was fantastic was hearing the GOP Drones earning their points with phone calls to the program listing the reasons why Iraq was really about terrorism.

The best thing they could come up with? That because Saddam paid off the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, taking him out reduces terrorism. In fact, because the Palestine question is the locus of Middle East tension and anti-American feeling, taking out Saddam and reducing suicide bombings and stabilizing Israel/Palestine is actually a blow to Al-Qaeda. Dude even had citations for the sharp decrease in suicide bombings over the last year.

What's insidious is that all of this is correct. Taking out Saddam may, in some small way, lessen the supply of suicide bombers, though it's hard for me to imagine that the effect would be more than negligible -- we're just talking about money here, and there's lots of money sloshing around in the Middle East. And the caller was exactly right about the importance of the Palestine question.

What's interesting about all of this is the degree of convolution to tie the Iraq war to terrorism and the vast gulf between the current justification and what was said before. I think the GOP is awfully worried about Spain, and the emerging consensus that their election was primarily about disinformation and distortion, instead of "appeasement."

But what's their response? No levelling with the American people. No admitting errors. More deception.

When all is calculated, this administration's contempt for the intelligence of the American people is what will finally undo them -- if not in the November elections, then in historical restrospective. What a fiasco.