Question: What do George W. Bush and Lee Harvey Oswald have in common?

Answer: “It wasn’t me! It was the CIA!”

As you probably already know, the real situation is nothing to joke about. Countless debates, thousands of bodies, and tens of billions of dollars later, America has been left with nothing to answer for the ugliest shift in U.S. foreign policy history.

Three hundred million dollars spent on an American-led weapons hunt that turned up “nada.” All those stockpiles that even Rumsfeld claimed were “in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north,” never turned up. When it was all over, David Kay, the Bush administration’s chief inspector, revealed that it was nearly impossible for Iraq to possess such weapons after the Gulf War. As expected, Kay has stepped down.

In a last, and seemingly desperate, attempt to put a spin on this so-called “imminent threat,” the President’s State of the Union address coined the term “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities,” or in Bushian: equipment that had been buried in the sand since the Gulf War. This alone clearly shows the stretch that was needed in justifying what we went to war over, making it all seem like a sick joke.

When questioned earlier this month by Diane Sawyer on the WMD myth, “what’s the difference?” was the only answer Bush could come up with, without the help of a teleprompter.

But now, after a State of the Union address that Gallup surveyed as one of the worst in 12 years, the White House has regrouped with fresh excuses.

They now have all but abandoned the WMD claim, that is, with the exception of Vice President Dick Cheney. Even while Bush was proclaiming no relationship between Saddam and Al-Qaeda, Cheney was in the other wing of the White House proclaiming just the opposite.

Like the Saddam-Osama link, the WMD claim is still going strong in the mind of Dick Cheney. So much, that it has almost become a disturbing neurosis. The day before David Kay’s stepping down, Cheney was carrying on about “conclusive evidence” of WMDs in Iraq, according to The New York Times.

Meanwhile, Bush has stepped in with sort of ambiguous-like-implicit-factual-opinionations of facts about Saddam that are supposed to make people think that it was a good idea to go to war. After being asked a specific question about WMDs, Bush responded to CNN reporters, “We know that he defied the United Nations year after year after year. And given the offense of Sept. 11, we know we could not trust the good intentions of Saddam Hussein because he didn’t have any.”

Remember: As long as you invoke 9/11, you can get away with just about anything.

And then, a deflection of blame in this mess: The golden goose here is the fact that chief inspector David Kay refuses to implicate Bush in the intelligence failures of Iraq’s capabilities. Apparently, this was all the Central Intelligence Agency’s fault. As you will soon see, 9/11 will not be the only thing used ad-nauseum, but this new development will as well.

You would think that, like 9/11, an investigation into the matter should be pursued. In fact, it’s something that any decent American should come to expect from their president. Even Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) commented to CBS, “I am absolutely convinced that [an investigation] is necessary, because this is a very serious issue and we need to not only know what happened, but know what steps are necessary to prevent the United States from ever being misinformed again.”

But just like 9/11, the Bush administration is, at least for now, refusing an investigation into the matter. Just like the stonewalled 9/11 commission, the administration is most likely buying their time once again to sweep the ugly parts under the rug.

And again like 9/11, a non-partisan investigation into alleged “intelligence failures,” may be more than enough to implicate the Bush Administration. It certainly wouldn’t help their re-election bid.

It’s admittedly possible to have faulty intelligence. But when your Secretary of State cites “evidence” that embarrassingly turns out to be magazine clippings and a plagiarized, 10-year-old, college dissertation, rational people see this as a red flag to consider before sending Americans off to die in the Middle East.

But hey, what’s the difference? …Right?

Mark Ostroff is a Collegian columnist.