Well, other bloggers have told you this, but you really will enjoy "The Final Word Is Hooray!," FAIR's compilation of premature celebratory quotes about the Iraq War from our journalistic betters back in the spring of '03. It's hard to pick a favorite -- this is just a mild example of the fun to be found within:

NPR's Mara Liasson: Where there was a debate about whether or not Iraq had these weapons of mass destruction and whether we can find it...

Brit Hume: No, there wasn't. Nobody seriously argued that he didn't have them beforehand. Nobody.

(Fox News Channel, April 6, 2003)

But, you know, some people will read that and not quite get what's so funny. Here's House Intelligence Committee chairman Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) responding to the Bush administration's release of Saddam documents, which began this week and will continue, apparently, right through this election year:

"Whether Saddam Hussein destroyed Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or hid or transferred them, the most important thing is we discover the truth of what was happening in the country prior to the war," he said.

Yeah, right, Pete. They were all spirited out in the dead of night just before the war, invisible to satellite photos and leaving behind no radiation traces or chemical traces or tire treads or any other kind of forensic evidence. Elves and fairies are really good at this kind of thing.

There are a couple of straws right-wingers will grasp at in this first batch of documents. Here's one straw:

The Pentagon Web site described [one] document this way: "2002 Iraqi Intelligence Correspondence concerning the presence of al-Qaida Members in Iraq. Correspondence between [regime] members on a suspicion, later confirmed, of the presence of an Al-Qaeda terrorist group. Moreover, it includes photos and names."

So I guess this is what the Bushites meant when they said Saddam was "harboring" terrorists -- they meant "they were in the country and at first he didn't know where the hell they were, or even if they were there at all." By that definition, the kids in the house in the Friday the 13th movies are "harboring" Jason.

Here's another straw for the right:

... one Iraqi intelligence document indicat[ed] Saddam's feared Fedayeen paramilitary forces were investigating rumors in the fall of 2001 that as many as 3,000 Iraqis and Saudis were going to fight in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion.

... "After presenting the matter to the Supervisor of Fedayeen Saddam, he ordered that the matter should be looked into for verification of the truth of the rumor," the translation said.

So he couldn't prevent ordinary citizens from crossing his border to volunteer for a war. Good thing we cleared that problem up!

Ah, but it's Groundhog Day, folks. Did you catch this?

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, on Wednesday compared the threat from Iran's nuclear programs to the September 11 terror attacks on the United States.

"Just like September 11, only with nuclear weapons this time, that's the threat. I think that is the threat," Bolton told ABC News' Nightline program....

Arrrrgh! It's happening again! Please make it stop!