Two folks wrote to ask me if I really thought the Bush forces would be using Richard Clarke's testimony to defend their boss. Well, maybe not his testimony, though it was nowhere near as negative about Bush as the news briefs indicated. But the excerpts I read from Clarke's book were generally supportive of Bush's actions on 9/11, and that's probably the next firestorm. Bush's foes are starting to charge that on that morning, Bush was no leader; that he was confused and not in control, and that a lot of his subsequent accounts of his day are simply fiction.
The Wall Street Journal (not exactly a liberal paper) recently ran an article that made Bush look pretty bad. One cannot link directly to the piece on the WSJ site but some of the anti-Bush sites are reusing it (here's one) and columnists like Gene Lyons are starting to cite it.
Back when Al Gore was running, every factual discrepancy in his statements was seized upon by his enemies as proof that the man was a pathological liar. Now you have this case where Bush has claimed he was watching live TV and saw the first plane crash into the World Trade Center…but it wasn't televised. So now we'll see all the folks who defended Gore for "understandable mistakes" say that this proves Bush is a congenital fibber…and all the folks who attacked Gore four years ago say, "Oh, come on…like you never misspoke?" If you follow politics long enough, you eventually see everyone switch sides.