The only question that remains is "so what?"

I can't believe that some people just now are getting worked up over the WMD question. It's been clear from firsthand evidence for several months that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And before the invasion it was clear from the work of U.N. inspection teams that the stockpiles cited by the Bush administration didn't exist.

A little more than a year ago Secretary of State Colin Powell, speaking to the U.N. Security Council, said, "we know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more."

Weapons inspectors knew that was not true. And now the evidence is obvious. David Kay, who led the search for weapons of mass destruction, said he now believes no weapons stockpiles existed.

Again, so what?

Are the American people outraged? Is Congress calling for impeachment proceedings?

No. Most don't seem to care. Apparently it's much more serious to try to cover up an affair with a White House intern than to fabricate a case for conquering another country, invading it, killing tens of thousands of its people, several hundred of our troops and spending more than $100 billion in the process.

Consequently, just months away from the presidential election, it seems that the Iraq war and the lies and deceit that justified it will not be major issues. That's partly because the two leading Democratic candidates are senators who voted to support the war.

Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards voted "yes" in October 2002 to the following resolution:

"The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to 1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and 2) enforce all relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq."

Why would our senators and members of the House of Representatives give Bush the go-ahead on these points? It is the constitutional duty of Congress to authorize declarations of war, not to vote away that responsibility and hand it to the president.

Kerry, the leading Democratic presidential contender, says now that he backed the president because he was duped like everybody else, convinced by administration lies that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were an imminent threat to our national security.

And the campaigns for president move forward. Kerry is too embarrassed to bring it up, and doesn't want to seem like a softy on foreign policy. Bush is blaming bad intelligence and not his exaggerations of it for the falsehoods he used to justify the invasion.

But we can make Bush pay for what were lies, not mistakes with the best of intentions. Short of impeachment, we can at least censure the president — and a grass-roots movement has been launched with that goal.

Since Congress was duped along with many of the rest of us, MoveOn.org is demanding that it formally censure Bush for lying about the Iraqi threat to gain congressional blessing for a regime change that was planned long before 9/11.

MoveOn.org is a populist cyber-movement whose organizers say has more than 2 million American members. On Tuesday in Washington, it joined with the anti-war group Win Without War to announce a petition drive to convince Congress that Bush should be censured.

Organizers said they already had 450,000 signatures from a week-old Internet campaign. Let's add to that figure.

A full page ad in The Washington Post on Tuesday said, "We know that long before Sept. 11, indeed from its first days, the Bush Administration was planning for war with Iraq and the subsequent occupation of the country. That decision having been made, the president ran a campaign of misinformation, of cherry-picking and distorting intelligence, of hype and hysteria that led America into an unnecessary war. ...

"An independent commission can deal with failures at the intelligence agencies. Congress should deal with the failures at the White House," the ad continued.

Yes, and we all know the Bush commission probing pre-war intelligence will not be reporting its findings until 2005, long after the election. You would think the president would want the air surrounding pre-war intelligence cleared.

The truth is that Bush knows the air will not be cleared. He knows any investigation will reveal he, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell exaggerated and lied. Let's censure the president.

The answer to the question, so what?, is that we're not going to let the president get away with it.

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Cary Brunswick is managing editor of The Daily Star. He can be reached at (607) 433-3055 or cary@thedailystar.com.