On Wednesday, President Bush met with national journalists for an "off the record" briefing to prep them for the national address he would be delivering later that evening about his decision to escalate the war in Iraq.  According to several reports, the President stressed the need to increase our presence in Iraq for reasons that included possible future military action against Iran and Syria.  Without giving details about why we might need to take such military action, the President would simply say that he couldn't go into details for national security purposes, but "if you knew what we know" it would be clear.

And there you have it--the classic tail of the boy who cried wolf.  When the President of the United States says that we may need to go to war with Iran, that is serious stuff that we all need to pay attention to.  But when that same President sold our country on the need to invade Iraq on the false premise that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of obtaining and using weapons of mass destruction, how can we believe that he is telling the truth now?  Our country is in precarious situation if we cannot trust whether our leader is telling us the truth about issues regarding our national security.  And as a democracy, we are weaker because of it.

Keith Olbermann sums up this predicament nicely, and effectively communicates my outrage over the President's recent decision to sink us further into the Iraqi civil war.