Happy Sixth Anniversary of the War in Iraq! Sort of! The war began on March 20, 2003, Baghdad time, so we're totally not late. Let's look back at the lies!

On March 8, George W. Bush told America "we are doing everything we can to avoid War in Iraq." Hah, the CIA's "special activities division" was already in Iraq, along with a couple Special Ops dudes, destabilizing things and generally "warring." That VERY SAME DAY Halliburton was awarded a $7 billion reconstruction contract. But hey, that bald-faced lie was actually one of the more harmless deceptions of that magical first Bush term. The next day, Condi Rice, the dead-ender Bushite whom lots of otherwise reasonable people still "like," went on Face the Nation and cited faulty intelligence gleaned through torture that the C.I.A. already had doubts about.

Hey, let's all go back in time with this remarkable Washington Post story from the day before the war. It is about how Bush lied, all the time, about everything, and everyone who paid attention knew it. It ran on page A13! Page one of every major newspaper was for reprinting those lies and adding some new ones, of course. It was a golden era of journalism.

There are still a lot of people still taken semi-seriously who should be frog-marched out of public service, journalism, and/or commentary for either believing or pretending to believe the obvious bullshit of those terrible years. But, you know, Kissinger still attends journalists' parties and Peter Beinart is "a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations" and basically there is still nothing you can really do to be kicked out of the foreign policy "establishment" once you're in, in this country. Kinda like finance!

So happy birthday quagmire! Don't forget to Tweet about it!

Lie by Lie: The Mother Jones Iraq War Timeline (8/1/90 - 2/14/08) [Mother Jones]