Franken-Lies-And-the-Lying-Liars-Who-Tell

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My Personal Search for Weapons of Mass Destruction
This is the chapter I've been putting off for the whole book. At one point I told TeamFranken
that I was going to wait until the reconstruction of Iraq was complete to write it, but they said
they wanted to read what I had to say while they were still alive.
Deep breath. Okay. Here's the thing.
I was genuinely torn about the war. On the one hand, I'm not a believer in the Bush
Doctrine of preemption. I think it could be used to justify wars of aggression, not just by us,
but by the Japs.
On the other hand, it would be silly to deny that, on 9/11, the world changed. On that
day, we learned that America was vulnerable to attack. There were hard choices to be made.
We were con fronting an enemy that was everywhere and nowhere. The person who had to
make those choices was the man with all the facts: George Herbert Walker Bush. And his
son-the President.
So, reluctantly, I became a supporter of the war against Saddam. In my own defense, I
should say that I wasn't thinking clearly. I was terrified by the imminent threat to me and my
family posed by Iraq's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.
I was especially frantic about the nuclear device Saddam was building with enriched
uranium obtained from Niger. The President had told the entire nation about that in his State
of the Union address.
My wife was not so worried about the nuclear threat. She was more concerned about a
chemical attack on the Frankens. They're doing some construction across from our apartment,
and my wife was convinced that the large cement mixer was one of those mobile chemical
weapons laboratories that Colin Powell told the U.N. about.
My son, Joe, who is normally very levelheaded, was less worried about a chemical attack
than a biological one. He thought the cement mixer was mixing up a potent batch of
ricin, a powerful neurotoxin made from castor beans, and that Saddam was planning to use it
on us and the Bellers in 9B.
My daughter, Thomasin, shared her brother's concern about biological weapons, but
she was less worried about neurotoxins, which kill reasonably quickly through acute hypoxic