Cheney’s botched joke.

Vice President Cheney “delighted core conservatives” at the Conservative Political Action Conference yesterday, despite his botched Al Gore joke:

It is worth reminding ourselves that, like it or not, the enemy we face in the war on terror has made Iraq the primary front in that war. To use a popular phrase, that…this is an inconvenient truth.

Cheney is also wrong, as last year’s National Intelligence Estimate made clear:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks…The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.