Liar, liar...

Yesterday Viewpoint carried a piece based on a Fox News story supporting the veracity of president Bush's claims that Iraq had been seeking uranium ore from Niger for use in nuclear weapons production and suggesting that Joe Wilson, who had been vociferously accusing Bush of lying about this, had himself been lying.

Mark Steyn has a fine piece on Wilson's prevarications in the Chicago Sun Times, and Jonah Goldberg at National Review refutes a couple of Wilson's lame attempts to defend himself in the Washington Post.

The important question is how Kerry will respond to this development. Kerry's campaign sponsers Wilson's web site and Wilson has been campaigning with Kerry, calling Bush a liar at Kerry campaign events. Doesn't Kerry owe Bush an apology?

Steyn writes that this isn't going to happen. Wilson was useful in discrediting Bush, whether his allegations were truthful or not, and now that his usefulness has expired he will be quietly allowed to fade into the oblivion of media amnesia.

Steyn puts it this way:

It would be nice to hear his media boosters howling en masse, "Say it ain't so, Joe!" But Joe Wilson's already slipping down the old media memory hole. He served his purpose - he damaged Bush, he tainted the liberation of Iraq - and yes, by the time you read this the Kerry campaign may well have pulled the plug on his Web site, and Salon magazine's luxury cruise will probably have to find another headline speaker, and he won't be doing Tim Russert again any time soon. But what matters to the media and to Senator Kerry is that he helped the cause of (to quote his book title) The Politics Of Truth, and if it takes a serial liar to do that, so be it.

Read the whole piece. It's worth it.