Cognitive dissonance alert

A Joe Conason column on Salon today picks up on something that's been rattling around in the back of my brain since I watched last week's press conference.

For the third time since the war began three years ago, Bush had falsely claimed that Saddam refused the U.N. weapons inspections mandated by the Security Council. For the third time, he had denied a reality witnessed by the entire world during the four months when those inspectors, under the direction of Hans Blix, traveled Iraq searching fruitlessly for weapons of mass destruction that, as we now know for certain, were not there.

But forget about whether the weapons were there for a moment. The inspectors definitely went to Iraq. They left only because the United States warned them to get out before the bombs started to fall on March 19, 2003. But for some reason the president of the United States keeps saying -- in public and on the record -- that the inspectors weren't there...

...Is it necessary to mention that this falsehood again went unnoticed in the mainstream media (although I took exception)? Historians will wonder someday how a free press permitted the world's most important official to say such things without contradiction. Meanwhile we can hope that next time, Jon Stewart will play back the tape on "The Daily Show" while bugging his eyes in disbelief. Then we will be reassured that reality still exists, even when the media and the president prefer to pretend otherwise.