SAME OLD BILL

Bill Clinton

November 29, 2007 -- Bill Clinton has always been a stranger to the truth, but is it possible that he's never heard of Google?

Apparently.

How else to explain his ridiculous claim - while campaigning for Hillary out in Iowa - that he "opposed [the] Iraq [war] from the beginning"?

Say what? In point of fact, only Joe Lieberman among Democrats was a stronger initial supporter of President Bush's decision to topple Saddam Hussein than Clinton.

Indeed, the former president boasted in a June 2004 interview with Time magazine: "I have repeatedly defended President Bush against the left on Iraq."

True, he thought the invasion was launched prematurely, and said so at the time. But he never disputed the wisdom of Bush's decision to use military force.

For the record, then, here's what Clinton really had to say about the Iraq war.

"We've got the power, we've got the juice. We should do the job," he told students at the University of Florida in an April 2003 speech.

Later that month, Clinton declared in St. Louis: "Saddam is gone and good riddance" - adding: "Bush has done the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein from power."

And just days after Bush's controversial State of the Union Address that year, Clinton said: "It is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted-for stocks of biological and chemical weapons."

What's more, Bill Clinton made a direct link between 9/11 and Iraq: In a 2004 Time interview, the former president stressed that because of 9/11, Bush had an obligation to move against Saddam:

"That's why I supported the Iraq thing," he said. "There was a lot of [weapons] stuff unaccounted for . . . When you're the president, and your country has just been through what we had, you want everything to be accounted for."

Clinton's aides now insist that he really did oppose the war - his public statements notwithstanding - but considered it inappropriate to publicly go against a sitting president.

So why not just keep his mouth shut?

With him, of course, that has never been an option.

First he lies, then he swears to it.

It's getting tiresome.