The “Bush Lied” folks are about as original as a can of no-frills beans. Oh sure the can is generic and they still give you gas, but there’s no real substance to them.

Yesterday, the buzz around the newsrooms in this country was around the panel that released a “scathing” (I must’ve heard that word about 2,000 times yesterday) report on what we know about the WMD capabilities of other countries. What was amazingly absent from a majority of the reporting was the fact that Iraq was not attacked on the basis of a lie, but rather on the basis of information we thought to be correct, but our intelligence agencies got wrong, something conservatives have been saying forever.

CBS, to its credit, ran this paragraph nestled snugly inside the article:

The report implicitly absolves the Bush administration of manipulating the intelligence used to launch the 2003 Iraq war, putting the blame for bad intelligence directly on the intelligence community.

“The daily intelligence briefings given to you before the Iraq war were flawed,” the report said. “Through attention-grabbing headlines and repetition of questionable data, these briefings overstated the case that Iraq was rebuilding its WMD programs.”

Amazing, isn’t it? Of course, we know this part of the report will be ignored for two reasons.

1. The Bush lied crowd will never believe anything but Bush Lied regardless of the facts (next time a Bush Lied feller tells ya something that’s incorrect, call him a liar; that’s how we operate now) and no matter how many times those facts are presented.

2. The MSM has parroted every Bush Lied claim from every wacko willing to make one since day one, and will probably not bother going back to re-question all their sources.

You will, however hear numerous assessments of the failure of all our intelligence agencies and their operatives. That part is already all over the place and makes up a majority of the stories surrounding this report. Why? Because even the perception of absolving the Bush administration of lying is something that cannot be tolerated.

Instead, we’ll hear about the intel screw-ups and those will be insinuated to be the fault of the Bush Administration. As I said, though, I’ll give CBS credit where it’s due. They’ve given the most balanced assessment of the report:

But the commission also said that it found no indication that spy agencies distorted the evidence they had concerning Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, a charge raised against the administration during last year’s presidential campaign.

“This is not `politicization’,” the panel said of its own report. “It is a necessary part of the intelligence process.”

So was John Kerry wrong when he said so? Or did he lie?

Source: CBS News