The Reliable Dick Cheney

Not only right, but psychic. Rush Limbaugh,never one to admit error, reminded listeners on Wednesday that he is invariably correct. It came during a conversation with a caller who was no more sarcastic than Rush was tongue-in-cheek:

CALLER: Your accuracy rating as stated yesterday or the day before, 99.1.

RUSH: No, no. Documented now to be almost always right 99.

CALLER: Okay. When you started, obviously before you had an opinion, it was a hundred percent. What were you wrong to drop it?

And Limbaugh provided a telling example of what he considers incomparable insight. Earlier that day Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R.-Ca.) and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton clashed during a House Foreign Relations Committee hearing over the bid of former Vice President Cheney bid to have some torture documents unclassified. Rush alleged

Getting to the bottom of the matter would prove every one of you is wrong about conducting the entire war on terror, Mrs. Clinton. Dick Cheney's not lying about documents, Mrs. Clinton. He has seen them and the documents that he wants released are simply the memos that show the success....

Maybe Dick Cheney isn't lying- no one does so 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But he arguably is the fellow who pushed hardest the myth that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11 (central to developing the case for the upcoming war), telling us on Meet The Press on December 9, 2001 about an imagined meeting in Prague between an Iraqi intelligence official and Mohammed Atta:

Well, what we now have that's developed since you and I last talked, Tim, of course, was that report that's been pretty well confirmed, that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack.

And claiming on the March 16, 2003 edition of the same program that Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear weapons program, American forces would be greeted in Iraq as liberators, and that hundreds of thousands of American soldiers would be unnecessary to secure the peace:

He’s had years to get good at it and we know he has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.... And over time, given Saddam’s posture there, given the fact that he has a significant flow of cash as a result of the oil production of Iraq, it’s only a matter of time until he acquires nuclear weapons.

Now, I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.

But to suggest that we need several hundred thousand troops there after military operations cease, after the conflict ends, I don’t think is accurate. I think that’s an overstatement.

So maybe Rush Limbaugh is right 99.1% of the time, but one of his favorite targets, Hillary Clinton, was the one on target when she implied the obvious (to almost all but Rush) about the former vice-president: "Well, it won't surprise you that I don't consider him a particularly reliable source of information."