Wow, Rep. Peter Hoekstra just loves making stuff up to score political points:

Michigan Republican Rep. Peter Hoekstra also suggested some unauthorized leaks could have been deliberate attempts to help al Qaeda.

“More frequently than what we would like, we find out that the intelligence community has been penetrated, not necessarily by al Qaeda, but by other nations or organizations,” he said.

“I don’t have any evidence. But from my perspective, when you have information that is leaked that is clearly helpful to our enemy, you cannot discount that possibility,” he added.

Uh, yeah.

When it becomes acceptable for a sitting Congressman to call intelligence analysts traitors without any evidence, we’ve lost something to the terrorists. It’s even worse when the officials leak no actual intelligence but only evidence of possible Constitutional violations by the White House.

When things like the silly Santorum/Hoekstra claim that “weapons [of mass 'death'] have been found” persist to rumble around mainstream news sources even though the claim is completely dishonest, it makes me very sad.

I’m not really asking for the media or Senators to be without bias. I don’t think it’s unreasonable, however, to ask that they strive to be truthful. When the media is presented with garbage like this, they should (respectfully) call the Senator and Congressman on this. That even applies to Fox News. Bias, after all, doesn’t necessarily have to be dishonest.

It’s not like we would invade every country with a vial of a disease or a few hundred degraded shells of chemical weapons. More importantly, that’s not even the standard the Bush administration set. After all, Santorum and Hoekstra are pushing this story as a justification of the war in Iraq and to bolster claims that the Iraq war was not a mistake. Essentially, they claim, we found what we were looking for.

What were we looking for, though? I read a suggestion to check the 2003 State of the Union Address to see what the President outlined, so I decided to take a look. Here’s the list of what he claimed and what we’ve found of that category:

I’m not really sure how Sen. Santorum sleeps at night when he makes claims like this. I’m not sure how the reporters and pundits who attempt to reinforce these claims sleep at night either.