Newsday reports on a speech given by New York's Republican governor, George Pataki, last night -- a speech in which he articulated the new Bush administration line (not "Saddam equals Osama," but "Saddam is approximately equal to Osama"):

"This is a president who knew that there were evil forces ... and he was going to defend us from those forces, not on the streets of New York but on the streets of Baghdad," Pataki told a gathering of Republican leaders at the Northeast Regional Leadership Conference.

Speaking at the beginning of a two-day gathering designed to rally the faithful for the 2004 presidential race, Pataki made repeated connections between the terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq, but his speech made no mention of Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida or Afghanistan.

Oh, and he attacked Bill Clinton's response to terrorism.

This is the new strategy, I think: Republicans have concluded that if they acknowledge that Saddam wasn't involved in 9/11, they can increase their efforts to connect him to Al Qaeda in general.

(Pataki's the perfect useful idiot for this. He's pro-choice and pro-gay rights, but over the years New York journalists have repeatedly floated suggestions -- presumably coming from his camp -- that he might be Bush's running mate in '00, that he might replace the cardiovascularly challenged Cheney in '04, and, just now on the local-news portion of NPR's Morning Edition, that he might be on the ticket in '08. It'll never happen unless he drinks the right-to-life and anti-gay Kool-Aid, but he seems not to know this: He was out there as a post-election spin doctor during the '00 recount and he's out there lying about Iraq's status as a potential exporter of terrorism to the U.S. now.)