The other day Dick Durbin made a big splash by proclaiming that the intelligence reports his Senate committee was seeing on WMD’s in Iraq didn’t match up with what was being told to the American people by the Bush administration.  It was another “Bush lied, people died” moment, but now a few days later we have Senator Joe Biden - one of Durbin’s fellow Democrats - disputing his claims on Meet The Press with Tim Russert:

MR. RUSSERT: I want to go back to 2002, because it’s important as to what people were saying then and what the American people were hearing. Here’s Joe Biden about Saddam Hussein: “He’s a long term threat and a short term threat to our national security.”

“We have no choice but to eliminate the threat. This is a guy who is an extreme danger to the world.”

“He must be dislodged from his weapons or dislodged from power.” You were emphatic about that.

SEN. BIDEN: That’s right, and I was correct about that. He must be, in fact—and remember the weapons we were talking about. I also said on your show, that’s part of what I said, but not all of what I meant. What I also said on your show at the time was that I did not think he had weaponized his material, but he did have. When, when the inspectors left after Saddam kicked them out, there was a cataloguing at the United Nations saying he had X tons of, X amount of, and they listed the various materials he had. The big issue, remember, on this show we talked about, was whether he had weaponized them. Remember you asked me about those flights that were taking place in southern Iraq, where—were they spraying anthrax? And, you know, what would happen? And, you know, so on and so forth. And I pointed out to you that they had not developed that capacity at all. But he did have these stockpiles everywhere.

MR. RUSSERT: Where are they?

SEN. BIDEN: Well, the point is, it turned out they didn’t, but everyone in the world thought he had them.

The weapons inspectors said he had them. He catalogued—they catalogued them. This was not some, some Cheney, you know, pipe dream. This was, in fact, catalogued. They looked at them and catalogued. What he did with them, who knows? The real mystery is, if he, if he didn’t have any of them left, why didn’t he say so? Well, a lot of people say if he had said that, he would’ve, you know, emboldened Iran and so on and so forth.

Well, Biden’s hopes for the Presidency just went up in smoke.  That sort of truth-telling isn’t going to jibe with the left’s “Bush lied people died” baloney, and they can’t have their main 2008 candidate going that far off the reservation.