Why is it that we never get upset at our presidents for not knowing things? "My staff got overzealous and did it without telling me" seems to always be a perfectly acceptable excuse. Or just "No one told me" or "I was given faulty intelligence." Shouldn't the first responsibility of any president of the U.S. be to know what's going on in his administration? And to fire those who supply him with faulty intelligence?
So now we have yet another case where something in a George W. Bush speech was not merely untrue but there was solid evidence at the time he said it that it was not true. On May 29, 2003, Bush announced that two trailers seized by U.S. and Kurdish troops were mobile biological laboratories. "We have found the weapons of mass destruction," he declared. Now it turns out that in a report filed two days earlier, the crew of the Pentagon-sponsored research mission had unanimously concluded the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons.
Bush's foes will charge that it's Bush caught in a lie. Bush's defenders will say "It's not a lie. He didn't know." I'm inclined to side with the latter but to suggest that this is nowhere near an acceptable excuse. It bothers me that a man who at any moment may make a decision that will get people killed is not operating with — and apparently not even insisting on — the latest, most accurate information available. That should bother the people who think Bush is a brilliant leader. Even a brilliant leader can make the wrong call based on bad data.