All these years of quietly, patiently supporting the Bush regime are finally rewarded. Now we patriots can do something to help: Lie for freedom!

This is one of those deals where you'd think a couple of grown-up men would have something better to do with their time, but once they've actually done it, you're glad somebody did.

Can you imagine, counting lies told publicly by Bush regime capos?

Howie reported earlier about how these guys, Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith, somehow affiliated with some suspiciously leftish-sounding outfit called the Center for Public Integrity, had done a study of official Bush-regime lies in the two years after 9/11, with the intent of tricking the country into war.

The way I figure it, the guys had more important stuff they were supposed to be doing, like vacuuming the living room or paying a stack of bills or feeding the fish, and by way of procrastinating they just sort of started counting regime lies, and the thing spun out of control to where the poor fish were probably floating belly-up and the guys still couldn't stop.

By the time they came up for air, you'll recall, counting only fibs told by high-ranking regimistas advancing the erroneous claims (1) that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and (2) that there were links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, they came up with a whopping 935 whoppers:

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration's case for war.

Now I know just what you're thinking. Only 935 Bushwhoppers? Here these people gave all their their blood, sweat, tears to lying us into their phony-baloney war, and even with a full two years to do it, they couldn't crack the magic 1,000 mark.

I say the least a patriotic American can do is to help push them over the top, retroactively, by calling to the Mssrs Lewis and Reading-Smith's attention some Bush-regime truth-benders they may have overlooked. I will personally pinky-swear to the authenticity of all of the following, within the normal survey margin of error of 19 percent:

* On Oct. 3, 2002, Paul Wolfowitz claimed that Saddam Hussein's kid--not the just-plain-thuggish one, the really creepy-wacko one--had once said on the Iraqi TV version of Big Brother: "George W. Bush is such a sissy, we can blow him away with just a few drops from our vast stockpiles of biological weapons."

* Irving "Lewis" Libby told an audience of Federalist Society law-crushers on Feb. 14, 2003, that Vice President Cheney's complete list of all Iraqi nuclear-weapons facilities (indicating those that are open late and those that are open 24 hours a day), having been sprayed with nerve gas by an Iraqi suicide bomber, had been turned over to the FBI, which felt it necessary to explode it.

* Condi Rice said on March 15, 2003, that she was once in a shoe store--her recollection was that it was in May of 2002--where one of the other customers swore under oath (Condi's chief shopping aide provided a Bible) that she had personally seen Iraqi high school students serving detention pasting labels that said "CAUTION: NUCULAR WEAPONS" on the kind of aluminum tubes that the Iraqi shop teacher who was supervising detention that day acknowledged could only be used for nucular weapons.

* At a press briefing on July 10, 2003, Scott McClellan announced that he had a statement from Karl Rove detailing his involvement in the Valerie Plame Wilson leak but that it turned out to have been written in invisible ink that Al Qaeda agents had substituted for the India ink he normally used for his calligraphy.

* On several occasions, dates unspecified, Donald Rumsfeld told New York Times reporter Judith Miller that Saddam Hussein's and Osama bin Laden's mothers frequently played together in an online canasta league, often as a team, and that on more than one occasion they paid off their losses with chemical weapons labeled "Iraqi surplus."

By my reckoning, that brings us up to 940--and counting. Together, we can do it! Lie for freedom!

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