Yes, he linked al Qaeda with Iraq

David Shuster's recap on Hardball last night may have been even more damning than Keith Olbermann's video comparisons from Monday night. From last night's Hardball:

BUSH: I was very careful never to say that Saddam Hussein ordered the attacks on America.

SHUSTER: But history shows the president did link Saddam with those who were responsible. Here’s what he said in 2002.

BUSH: The war on terror is—you can’t distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam with you talk about the war on terror.

He’s a threat because he is dealing with al Qaeda.

We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade.

SHUSTER: Vice President Cheney claimed that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in the Czech Republic in April 2001.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: As well, you have said in the past that it was, quote, “pretty well confirmed.”

DICK CHENEY, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: No, I never said that.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: OK, I think that is ...

CHENEY: That’s absolutely not.

SHUSTER: But Cheney was captured on videotape almost three years before that interview, just a few months after 9/11, saying exactly that, the very thing he denied saying to the reporter.

CHENEY: It’s been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

SHUSTER: More contradictory still, on the eve of the Iraq war, the White House in a letter to Congress telling lawmakers that force was authorized against those who, quote, “aided the 9/11 attacks.”

In any case, both the president and vice president are presenting themselves as upbeat and seemingly unworried about their credibility problems. Though the violence in Iraq has gotten worse if recent months, the vice president said today ...

CHENEY: Progress has not come easily, but it has been steady.

SHUSTER: And President Bush added at his news conference ...

BUSH: We’re making progress because we’ve got a strategy for victory.

SHUSTER (on camera): The problem for the White House is the public is increasingly convinced that just because the Bush administration argues it has a plan doesn’t mean it will be carried out well or accomplished, and today President Bush acknowledged that a decision about a withdrawal from the U.S. forces may be left to his successor, the strongest declaration so far that U.S. troops will likely be staying in Iraq through early 2009.

I’m David Shuster for HARDBALL, at the White House.

This administration will say anything to get themselves out of the dog-house for a newscycle.

Kevin Drumm, keeping them honest:

No one has ever suggested that Saddam had no contact at all with al-Qaeda. He did. But it never amounted to anything, and the credible evidence indicates that there hadn't even been any casual contact between Saddam and al-Qaeda for over four years by the time we invaded Iraq in 2003. This document does nothing to suggest otherwise.

One way to build credibility and "stay the course" is to stop lying about things. Especially when there is video tape.

Clinton lied about a dress. Bush lies about war.