Run away! Run away!

Now they said it...

Vice President Dick Cheney repeated his assertions of al-Qaida links to Saddam Hussein's Iraq on Thursday....

Cheney contended that al-Qaida was operating in Iraq before the March 2003 invasion led by U.S. forces and that terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was leading the Iraqi branch of al-Qaida. Others in al-Qaida planned the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"He took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq, organized the al-Qaida operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene and then, of course, led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June," Cheney told radio host Rush Limbaugh during an interview. "As I say, they were present before we invaded Iraq."

...and now they didn't.

Interrogations of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and documents seized after the 2003 US-led invasion confirmed that his regime had not been cooperating with Al-Qaeda, the Washington Post reported on its website Friday. ...

The Post reported that a newly released declassified Department of Defense report said information obtained after the fall of Saddam confirmed the prewar position of the US Central Intelligence Agency and Pentagon intelligence that the Iraqi government had had no substantial contacts with Al-Qaeda.

In his continuing flight from reality, "The Big" Dick Cheney managed to ignore both that Zarqawi was a rival to bin Laden until after the invasion of Iraq and that while in Iraq, Zarqawi was operating out of the Kurdish north, an area beyond Saddam's control. Then again, facts were never very useful to the Shrub team - which, the report makes clear, knew there were no links and deliberately chose to ignore that fact.

I should make it clear that when I refer to Cheney's "flight from reality," I don't mean that he's delusional, as some are maintaining. I mean I envision him running down the street, being chased by a figure labeled "Reality," with his fingers in his ears shouting "LA LA LA LA - I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" He knows goddam well what the truth of the matter is - he just consciously refuses to admit to it.