Bush's last defense against critics (and why it's bogus)

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We heard today from President Bush -- he "blasted his critics," branding them hypocrites because more than 100 Congressional Democrats had access to the same intelligence as the White House and they voted to support the President's plans to remove Saddam. Now they're kicking him while he's down. Poor baby.

Of course, what he won't mention is that they only saw part of the picture -- Bush hid the rest.

It's clear now that many analysts expressed doubts about the intelligence that the administration was relying on. For example:

• INR never bought the claim about uranium from Africa.
  
• DIA thought the informant in the Iraqi-al Qaida connection was a liar.
  
• Drones? The Air Force thought it was ridiculous.
  
• Aluminimum tubes? DOE didn't believe it.

Did we hear about this in the run up to the war? Nope. Fact is, probably not a single one of the Congressional Democrats Bush is chastising today knew about any of that.

What would have happened had they known then what they know now?

• Saddam did not actively assist al Qaida
  
• Colin Powell's mobile weapons labs were based on flimsy evidence
  
• Condi Rice's pronouncements about aluminum tubes had been debunked before she made a single public statement about them.

What would have happened if we, and those Congressional Democrats, had known about all that?

A couple of these Democrats have come out and said that their vote was a mistake, the most recent being John Edwards. And, of course, Bush slammed them, accusing all of them of being demagogues. Karl Rove rides again.

[Note: some Democrats have also piled on, complaining that we should have heard from these guys a year ago or more. Maybe so, but I still give them credit -- better late than never.]

But I digress. The fact is this administration cherry-picked the intel to scare us into a war they wanted to fight from Day One.

Tim Grieve:

As his poll numbers plummet, as his party begins to look past him, [Bush] spends Veterans Day on a stage set in Pennsylvania, insisting that it doesn't matter that he was wrong about war because the people he fooled were wrong about it, too.

I supported the war before, during and after "major combat operations" had ended. People very close to me did the same thing. But when it became clear that the President had lied and exaggerated in making his argument for war, when it became clear that he spun the facts to sell his case, then it became clear that he had, and has, betrayed his public trust and has diminished the credibility of his office and our country.

History may yet judge us and say that what we lost was far more important than what we gained from this war.

But it's not too late. We can turn the judgement of history around now. But we can't do it by continuing to make the same mistake, by continuing to "stay the course." We have to start talking, now, about the things that Bush doesn't want us to discuss. We have to start talking now about how to bring this thing to a close and how to get out. There are some public officials starting to do that. Let's give them the stage. Let's begin that debate.