I haven't written anything political here for a little while because every time I try, things quickly descend into the Painfully Obvious. Does anyone not know that Bush is in trouble? That the torture scandal is a no-win game for him? (For more on that, read John McCain, Larry C. Johnson and Frank Rich.)
I actually don't understand the logic behind Bush's new excuse about how Congress had the exact same intelligence and most of it voted to authorize the war in Iraq. Even if that's true — and I don't see Republican leaders racing to assure us it is — it's a pretty lame admission from a guy who claims that even if he'd had better info, he still would have done all the same things. I don't think even supporters of the war are comfy with the notion that the President of the United States and Congress operate off flawed intelligence, even if that somehow leads them to the proper course of action. They need to be reminded that bad information is always dangerous and that this administration doesn't seem all that upset about it.
But I also don't get why Democrats keep harping on this "lie" thing and saying he "misled us into war." Some people will buy that it was deliberate but others will write it off to good intentions and bad sources, and we shouldn't tolerate that, either. Seems to me, Democrats would be better off (and perhaps more accurate) saying, "Our Iraq policies have been a mixture of faulty intelligence, misleading intelligence, cherry-picked intelligence and intelligence slanted to justify what this administration already intended to do. It doesn't matter how much of this was done intentionally. None of these are acceptable, especially when sending Americans off to war." Then again, I also don't get why some of them — John Kerry, especially — aren't more careful about quotes that include the word, "intelligence." When politicians are out there saying, "We didn't have the intelligence" or "our intelligence was insufficient," you wonder if something Freudian isn't in the air.
By the way: I have now had TimeSelect, the new subscription service for the New York Times, for two months and I've yet to read an article there that I couldn't find for free elsewhere on the Internet. The Frank Rich column linked above is a good example. I don't think they're getting another fifty bucks out of me next year, especially since this year's fee is all going for Judith Miller's severance package.