I guess I missed this, but was made aware of it when Adam Smith was on KUOW’s Weekday this morning, but dear leader apparently told Brit Hume the other day that we were going to war with Iraq regardless of whether there was any reason to.

Does it matter that they lied about there being weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Not really. Much like not going to Congress about getting revisions to FISA, that would have been a distraction and possibly precluded the legislature giving him the greenlight to invade. WMDs, however compelling an argument they might have seemed, and however confident Bush and Cheney claimed to be that they knew for a fact that they were there, were moot, because we would have invaded anyway.

How is this asshole getting away with this?

HUME: Can you say today that if you had known then what you know now about the weapons, that you would have made the same decision.

BUSH: I said it today, and I said it at the last speech I gave.

And I’ve said it throughout the campaign to the American people. I said I made the right decision. Knowing what I know today, I would have still made that decision.

HUME: Now if you had this — if the weapons had been out of the equation, because the intelligence did not conclude that he had them, it was still the right call?

BUSH: Absolutely.

In other words: “Eh. Evidence. Yeah, we gave you evidence so you would vote to let us do what we wanted. It’s not like it mattered. We were gonna invade anyway because I wanted to.”

Could he at least claim that of course we wouldn’t have gone to war if we thought we had no cause to? I mean, I wouldn’t have believed it, and neither would anyone capable of thinking, but to admit that we were going to invade a country that had no attacked us, regardless of whether the only justification we could come up with was true–how much of an arrogant prick do you have to be?

You should also read Dahlia Lithwick’s article in Slate about the administrations disdain for actually have to obey laws or anything so boring as that.