No Kay Blog

It's like a hot new dance craze: Sen. Hutchison continues to be in the news for her attempted backpedaling from the disastrous invasion of Iraq in last week's debate.

The Washington Post is one of many outlets that picked up the Associated Press story.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, one of President Bush's most ardent loyalists on the war in Iraq, voiced her strongest criticism yet of the administration's reasons for going to war.

In a debate with her challenger in the Nov. 7 election, Hutchison, R-Texas, said she would not have voted for war had she known there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But she also made it clear she does not support troop withdrawal.

"If I had known then what I know now about the weapons of mass destruction, which was a key reason that I voted to go in there, I would not vote to go into Iraq the way we did," Hutchison said.

There's more coverage in this week's Austin Chronicle, which does a nice job of cutting through Kay Bailey's BS. In response to her claims that Bush was also misled by bad intelligence, the Chronicle says:

We might recommend our senior senator read Ron Suskind's biography of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, The Price of Loyalty, wherein O'Neill exposes how the Bushites were planning the invasion eight months before 9/11, or even the infamous Downing Street memo, wherein British senior ministers secretly expressed concern that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of the Bush administration.

They also call her on the claims that weapons inspectors didn't have access to Iraq after 1998, and label her reference to 9/11 a "perfunctory invocation of That Horrible Event That Had Nothing to Do With Iraq".