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.

Who would’ve imagined that a Republican congress, the supposed party of “small government” and federalism would so wantonly embrace social engineering via federal mandate? If I have a major disappointment with the modern Republican party, it’s that they no longer offer a consistent policy alternative to the Democrats, at least not on policy principles. We’re reduced to ideology.

See, liberals and/or supporters of the federal government also want healthy marriages and aid for the poor. Now it’s not a debate about whether we should do these things, but of what particular constituency we’ll “please” with a particular policy proposal. Republicans like Santorum want to please their faux-religious arch-conservative supporters like the AFA. Liberals want to… well, I dunno, since the people they tend to please on these marriage things don’t write big campaign checks. They do make people like Heidi happy, so I know there’s a constituency there…

Used to be that one party would oppose a program on the principle that the federal government shouldn’t be interfering in social policy. The other would support it and we’d get a robust debate (even if it was just in the magazines and policy papers) about balancing those fundamental principles. Now, that discussion is useless because we know that big government lies at the end of all possible roads. Sad, really.