On Sept. 18, President Bush finally admitted what the anti-war crowd, intelligence information and logic have been saying for months. He said “We’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with Sept. 11.”

Thank you Mr. President, those might just be the truest words to come out of your mouth since you took [sic] office. But contrast those 13 words with thousands from the State of the Union, a speech used to rally a nation on the eve of war, based on twisted evidence, half-truths and many statements connecting Saddam Hussein, Sept. 11 and Al Qaeda.

In that speech, Bush revealed, “Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda.” Now, the president spends too much time here on semantics, while he should be leading the country. He doesn’t directly connect Saddam Hussein with Sept. 11, but he clearly claims Hussein assists and supports Al Qaeda.

However, statements like these, which include the words “Saddam Hussein,” “Sept. 11,” “Al Qaeda,” and “terror,” appear often in Bush administration rhetoric since September of last year.

It seems that instead of sound intelligence data, military expertise, and a genuine concern with U.S. safety as the forces behind the move to war, Bush took us into Iraq with the guidance of a very talented marketing team.

The real question here should not be why our government lied to us over the past year (oil, greed, imperialism, etc.,) but rather why we as Americans sit here and take it.

The reason can probably be found somewhere between an exaggerated fear of “terra,” and the post-Sept.11 blind patriotism, wrap-yourself-in-the-flag attitude. “Question our president? How dare you!”

You know as well as I do that without the courage to question authority, to speak out when you believe reality isn’t living up to American ideals, that blacks would be sitting at the back of the bus, women would be confined to cooking and cleaning and we would be speaking English right now (British English, that is).

In the meantime, the public’s attitude has regressed to apathy and the tough questions still are not being asked.

Questions such as where are those WMDs that were an immediate threat to our security? Are we really safer now that most of the world sees us as aggressors? And what about Osama Bin Forgotten?

And as the administration continues to do the back step, only time will tell if, in the eyes of Americans and the world, they can really dance.