Aside from his incredibly dangerous views on foreign and defense policy, and his cockamamie ideas about returning to the gold standard, and his conspiratorial mindset, and his whiny, arrogant, debate appearances, and a thousand other faults, Ron Paul might have been president.

But this is far beyond the pale - even if a Democrat had said it:

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul said Thursday evening that Bush administration officials were gleeful after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks because it gave them a pretext to invade Iraq.

"Just think of what happened after 9/11. Immediately before there was any assessment there was glee in the administration because now we can invade Iraq," the Texas Republican told a group of mostly young backers in Iowa. He went on to suggest officials are now setting the stage for an invasion of Iran.

This is a guy who plays political footsie with skinheads, racists, anti-Semites, and other knuckledragging low lifes by not forthrightly denouncing their support. He has also been known to hint at 9/11 trutherism.His policy prescriptions would almost certainly lead to economic chaos and make a dangerous world into a powder keg.

And now he smears George Bush and his administration by making a statement that he just made up out of whole cloth. There is not one shred of evidence that anyone in the Bush administration was "gleeful" at any time, anywhere, for any reason connected to 9/11. It is a lie. Not even Bush's harshest, most unrelenting and unbalanced critics have ever made such a shocking, unproven allegation.

Bush may have been inept and inarticulate but if anything could be said about his and his administration's reaction to 9/11 and contemplation of war with Iraq, there was no "glee" to be found anywhere. Only in Ron Paul's warped imagination could such a thing be so.