With the State of the Union out of the way and the New Hampshire primary dominating the political airwaves, the Bush administration is ducking low and letting the on-air pundits and political hotshots endlessly debate the Democrats.

I could do so as well, but I feel that we need to let some of the process just take its course and let voters do the talking right now.

What we should be focusing on is truth-telling.

Telling the truth was a big deal in the late ’90s. After all, we impeached a president because we thought he lied under oath. Not about national security, or intelligence estimates or anything like life and death for millions of American servicemen, but about oral sex.

The high moral ground staked out by Republicans in the turmoil of the end of the Clinton administration has turned into a quagmire. Frankly, when it comes to telling the truth, the Bush administration has a whole set of problems.

Right now, conservatives are concerned — very concerned — about a recent spate of retirees who have gone on to state, publicly and boldly, that the Bush administration, gasp, lies! All the time, about all kinds of stuff, and anyone who disagrees gets smeared.

It all started with two men: Ambassador James Wilson and now-retired Army Gen. Eric Shineski.

Ambassador James Wilson, in case you don’t recall, was sent on a diplomatic mission to Nigeria to investigate those claims that Bush made in his last State of the Union address about Iraq’s attempt to buy yellow-cake, which is not a delicious treat but a chalky substance that can be turned into uranium.

Wilson went to Nigeria and found, well, nothing. And his findings of nothing were reported to the Bush administration. They decided that when Wilson told one thing about WMDs and Iraq (“They aren’t trying to build any, sir.”), they would go ahead and say the exact opposite.

As a possible result, Ambassador Wilson’s wife was exposed as a CIA operative, a move so petty, so dangerous, and so inexcusable that there is an investigation into that event going on right now. The exposure angered many former CIA operatives, including Larry Johnson, a decorated former CIA analyst, Bush supporter and ardent Republican. He recently wrote a letter to Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert explaining that the bullying of the intelligence agencies into following the Bush administration’s policies violated a primary principle of the intelligence services, which is impartiality.

The other gentleman was destroyed, fired and disgraced by the Bush administration. Former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shineski had the temerity to say that the occupation of Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of soldiers, be costly in terms of both human lives and dollars, and that the Army would not readily win or be able to control the situation in Iraq if a full invasion occurred. For this ridiculous statement of common sense, Gen. Shineski was terminated a year before his commission ran out, and at his retirement after years of faithful service, not a single Bush administration official attended.

So now we have David Kay, of the famous Kay report. Kay spent months combing Iraq after the war ended (a loose term because, contrary to Bush’s wish that major military operations were over, this war is still on). Kay is an expert with a long history of dealing with both Iraq and disarmament issues worldwide. I will let him say it in his own words:

“I don’t think they existed.”

Simple enough, and yet I guarantee that statement will be turned against him. We will be hearing about how David Kay wasn’t sufficiently committed to the search for WMDs, or that another agenda prevented him from carrying out his mission. Conservative pundits will tell you that it doesn’t matter that he didn’t find stockpiles of weapons; he found evidence that Iraq could make stockpiles of weapons.

David Kay has insisted in further interviews that American intelligence was to blame. We didn’t know we wouldn’t find anything because we assumed we were going to find something. Fine, and if that is indeed the case, then Bush needs to apologize to every single American for the case he made for war. Explicitly, unequivocally, and directly. Of course, to see the Bush administration admit a mistake may cause the time-space continuum to tear.

The case was made to the American people that “Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” and Bush constantly referenced our doom in the form of a mushroom cloud.

These are called lies. Lies about oral sex were considered impeachable by upright Republicans. Why are lies about war and terrorism excusable?

Rob Deters ([email protected]) is a second-year law student.