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...if it wasn't so pathetic. The entire crowd who used to bash Bill Clinton for "parsing" his speech is now clinging desperately to the fact that Bush, personally, never used the exact words "imminent threat" regarding Iraq. What a crock. From the estimable Daily Howler:

Did the Bush Admin see—and suggest—an imminent threat? It’s hard to suppress those mordant chuckles when one sees how many people thought so. Last October 7, for example, Dave Boyer of the Washington Times reported that a few “key lawmakers [had] declared their support” for the pending Iraq war resolution. Why had Dick Armey decided to back it? Boyer told you—in the Washington Times:

BOYER (10/7/02): House Majority Leader Dick Armey, one of the few Republican lawmakers who had voiced concerns about attacking Iraq, said the White House has convinced him that Saddam’s weapons buildup is an imminent threat to the United States and Israel. “I’m convinced the snake is out of his hole,” said Mr. Armey, Texas Republican. “So we have to kill him.”

Boyer, at the Washington Times, seemed to think the concern was an “imminent threat.” And why wouldn’t he think such a thing? Here’s what his colleague, Joseph Curl, had reported just one day before:

CURL (10/6/02): President Bush yesterday said Saddam Hussein has a history of attacking his enemies first and could inflict “massive and sudden horror” on the United States, offering a new reason for a pre-emptive military strike against the Iraqi leader.

Mr. Bush said the Iraqi dictator has a “horrible history” of attacking his enemies first. “We cannot ignore history. We must not ignore reality. We must do everything we can to disarm this man before he hurts one single American,” the president told hundreds of cheering police and National Guardsmen.
Gee! Any way you could think that Saddam posed a threat, or that the threat might be immediate? And was there any way to get that idea from Bush’s speech in Cincinnati, given just one day later? Here was Curl’s opening paragraph:

CURL (10/8/02): President Bush last night said Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is a “murderous tyrant” who could attack the United States “on any given day” using unmanned aerial vehicles loaded with chemical or biological weapons.

That was the opening paragraph, in the Washington Times, about Bush’s biggest fall speech on this subject! Of course Curl himself—at the Washington Times—had long thought an “imminent threat” was at issue. Here’s what he’d written weeks earlier:

CURL (9/21/02): Administration officials have in recent days ratcheted up talk about unilateral U.S. action in the event the United Nations fails to deliver the type of resolution Mr. Bush desires…[S]enior administration officials, including Vice President Richard B. Cheney, have laid out the case for pre-emptive strikes to deal with imminent threats to the United States.

Gee, after reading that it's tough to imagine why anyone would think that Bush was making the case that Saddam posed an "imminent" threat to the US. And that's before you get into any number of statements by Condi "Smoking Gun" Rice or Don "no metric for success" Rumsfeld.