Decades of budget cuts in education are finally yielding results, a fact confirmed by CNN’s poll of March 16, which shows that an astonishing 51 percent of the public believe that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (news – web sites) was responsible for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

There is no reason to think that. None. True, George W. Bush has asserted the existence of indirect links between low-level Al Qaeda operatives and Iraqi intelligence officials–a lame lie repeatedly denied by the CIA (news – web sites)–but even our professional prevaricator has never gone so far as to accuse Saddam of direct involvement in 9-11. Despite their increasingly tenuous grasp on reality, not even the Bush Administration’s most fervent hawks deny that the secular dictator of Iraq (news – web sites) is a mortal enemy of the Islamist extremists of Al Qaeda. No mainstream media outlet has ever reported otherwise.