So Fox News is trumpeting claims by Rick Santorum and Peter Hoekstra that it is somehow a big deal that US troops have found 500 sarin and mustard gas shells in Iraq… that were buried in the 1980’s.

How sad for the Republicans that they have been reduced to this.

The Post:

"Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) told reporters yesterday that weapons of mass destruction had in fact been found in Iraq, despite acknowledgments by the White House and the insistence of the intelligence community that no such weapons had been discovered.

"We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons," Santorum said.

The lawmakers pointed to an unclassified summary from a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center regarding 500 chemical munitions shells that had been buried near the Iranian border, and then long forgotten, by Iraqi troops during their eight-year war with Iran, which ended in 1988.

The U.S. military announced in 2004 in Iraq that several crates of the old shells had been uncovered and that they contained a blister agent that was no longer active. Neither the military nor the White House nor the CIA considered the shells to be evidence of what was alleged by the Bush administration to be a current Iraqi program to make chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

Last night, intelligence officials reaffirmed that the shells were old and were not the suspected weapons of mass destruction sought in Iraq after the 2003 invasion."

Now, Sean Hannity tells me, I am supposed to forget the Niger Forgeries, the aluminum tubes, the mobile biological weapons labs, the storehouses full of Mustard, Sarin, and VX and the secret meeting in Prauge.

All you have is trash buried in the eighties and "forgotton"! Ha!

"In our world, there will only be triumph and self-abasement." - O’Brien, 1984