Why half the country still buys WMD argument

All of the WMD hype earlier this summer by Republican Senator Rick Santorum has seemed to have paid off.  In a new Harris Poll, the number of Americans that still think Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction at the same time the U.S. invaded has substantially increased over the last few months:

Despite being widely reported in the media that the U.S. and other countrieshave not found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, surprisingly; more U.S.adults (50%) think that Iraq had such weapons when the U.S. invaded Iraq. Thisis an increase from 36 percent in February 2005.

So why the sudden increase?  Credit U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania Rick Santorum.  In June, Santorum claimed that such weapons have recently been found in Iraq:

"We have found weapons of mass destruction  in Iraq, chemical weapons," Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., said in a quickly called press conference late Wednesday afternoon.

Readingfrom a declassified portion of a report by the National GroundIntelligence Center, a Defense Department intelligence unit, Santorumsaid: "Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent.Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq's pre-Gulf War chemicalmunitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions areassessed to still exist."

Of course, most of us would agree that "possessing weapons of mass destruction" means actually having the capacity to cause mass destruction.  But the recovered munitions that Santorum referred to were weapons more than 20 years old, and therefore unusable in a military situation.

According to David Kay, President Bush's good buddy whose team searched for such weapons in Iraq after the '03 invasion, the munitions that Santorum was ranting about on the news were "less toxic than most things that Americans have under their kitchen sink at this point."

The cable news channels chose to spend time covering Santorum's lie, and ignored David Kay's rebuttal.  So now half the country believes the wild-eyed notion that Saddam was fully loaded when America invaded.

Yesterday on CNN, commentator Jack Cafferty analyzed the WMD notion that won't die.  The video is below: