A terrifying cabal of elites is meeting this week in D.C. for the "Washington Ideas Festival," to discuss only the most important Ideas. So why was Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi liar who supplied false intelligence to the Bush administration, invited?

Chalabi was the star of Washington cocktail parties leading up to the invasion of Iraq, and he was considered "our man in Baghdad" by the Defense and State departments. He supplied intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, and when these weapons never materialized, the government realized it had been duped by a charlatan who just wanted the U.S. to invade Iraq so he could capitalize on and grow his political power during the ensuing chaos. He's been estranged from the U.S. government for years now, and we didn't even know that he was allowed to step foot in Washington again.

But apparently he is! For the Washington Ideas Festival! To be interviewed by, of all people, his former cocktail party friend Sally Quinn, the old Washington entrenched class' top socialite. Ideas! Oh goodness:

"Getting rid of Saddam was certainly justified," he told Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn in their conversation at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. He said of his famously influential support for the war, "We were concerned about Saddam's oppression." He added when Quinn asked about the alleged weapons of mass destruction that never materialized, "The weapons of mass destruction was to our view a marginal issue."

Sure, marginal. It was a marginal issue.

Slate's Dave Weigel has been covering this important thinky-person conference in person, and can't "understand why I sat through a 15 minute segment with Ahmed Chalabi, a fraud and a liar who helped sucker America into the invasion of Iraq, handled gently and respectfully by the Washington Post's Sally Quinn." Why you were there to hear ideas, at the Washington Ideas Festival! Don't complain. Just listen to the many ideas! They could be "lies." But lies are ideas too!

Here's a brief clip of this man's very important ideas: