Bush Lied is the Big Lie

Debra Saunders

Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson wants to impeach President Bush. In arguing that point, he asked Fox News' Bill O'Reilly on Tuesday, "Have you seen the National Intelligence Estimate that was provided in October of 2002, in which the intelligence agency under the State Department said that Iraq was not building up a nuclear capability, that this whole story about the aluminum tubes (reportedly sought by Saddam Hussein in Niger) was completely off base?"

I decided to re-read the NIE excerpts that the administration released. What does the report say? "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of U.N. restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade." The NIE also reported that Iraq had "expanded its chemical and biological infrastructure under the cover of civilian production," that Baghdad had renewed production of mustard and sarin gases, and that Iraqi missiles could threaten the "U.S. homeland."

Yes, the NIE key judgments reported that some officials in the State Department did not believe Saddam Hussein was pursuing a "comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons." But the report also noted that, "Most agencies assess that Baghdad started reconstituting its nuclear program about the time that (U.N. weapons) inspectors departed -- December 1998."

So let us review the Bush-lied argument that Anderson and other war critics espouse. They say Bush lied about WMD, when, in fact, America's best intelligence presented no doubt about Iraq having chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. And according to the NIE, most intelligence agencies also believed Iraq had been working on nukes for four years.

Here's another point that the Bush-lied misinformation campaign has forgotten. While war critics point to Bush's inclusion of this sentence -- "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" -- in his 2003 State of the Union Address as proof that Bush misled the country into war, Bush uttered those words three months after Congress voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

Bush Lied is the Big Lie. It takes the controversy over one aspect of U.S. intelligence on Iraq's WMD -- the nuclear program question -- to argue that the whole WMD argument was bogus. That is, the president's accusers are guilty of the very sort of dishonest selectivity that they accuse Bush of using.

Now the Bush-lied lie is boomeranging on those Democratic presidential hopefuls -- Sens. Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Christopher Dodd and former Sen. John Edwards -- who voted in favor of the Iraq war resolution.

By going along with the Bush-lied spin, by refusing to acknowledge that the intelligence community presented strong reasons to vote for war, these Democrats have boxed themselves into a corner. They now have only one rationale for their vote that they can use -- they were duped by the nincompoop Bush -- or one rationale that they cannot use -- they sent U.S. troops to Iraq against their better judgment but out of naked ambition.

And the dishonesty now has placed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the uncomfortable position of pushing for passage of a bill to continue funding a war into next year that the grassroots believe was based on a lie.

So how does Pelosi plan on getting the House to pass the Iraq spending bill? As The Washington Post reported, the Democratic leadership has larded the U.S. Troop Readiness, Veterans' Health and Iraq Accountability Act with pork. After all the (deserved) rhetoric decrying Republican big spending, the Democratic leadership inserted $25 million for spinach growers, $75 million for peanut storage, and $120 million for shrimp and Atlantic menhaden fishermen into the supplemental spending bill.

The idea is to sweeten the pot so that war opponents will agree to fund a war they oppose, while war supporters will vote for the bill, despite provisions the seem to be designed solely to undermine the Bush surge.

Pelosi frequently says that President Bush must heed the message that American voters sent in November 2006. Who knew that message was to fund the war while undermining the war effort and to spend more tax dollars on pork?

Dick Morris: The Phoniest Scandal of the Century (So Far)

Dick Morris

When will the Bush administration grow some guts? Except for its resolute -- read: stubborn -- position on Iraq, the White House seems incapable of standing up for itself and battling for its point of view. The Democratic assault on the administration over the dismissal of United States attorneys is the most fabricated and phony of scandals, but the Bush people offer only craven apologies, half-hearted defenses, and concessions. Instead, they should stand up to the Democrats and defend the conduct of their own Justice Department.

There is no question that the attorney general and the president can dismiss United States attorneys at any time and for any reason. We do not have civil servant U.S. attorneys but maintain the process of presidential appointment for a very good reason: We consider who prosecutes whom and for what to be a question of public policy that should reflect the president's priorities and objectives. When a U.S. attorney chooses to go light in prosecuting voter fraud and political corruption, it is completely understandable and totally legitimate for a president and an attorney general to decide to fire him or her and appoint a replacement who will do so.

The Democratic attempt to attack Bush for exercising his presidential power to dismiss employees who serve at his pleasure smacks of nothing so much as the trumped-up grounds for the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson in 1868. Back then, radical Republicans tried to oust him for failing to obey the Tenure of Office Act, which they passed, barring him from firing members of his Cabinet (in this case, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton) without Senate approval. Soon after Johnson's acquittal, the Supreme Court invalidated the Tenure of Office Act, in effect affirming Johnson's position.

But instead of loudly asserting its view that voter fraud is, indeed, worthy of prosecution and that U.S. attorneys who treat such cases lightly need to go find new jobs, the Bush administration acts, for all the world, like the kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. All Republican supporters of the administration can do is to point to Bill Clinton's replacement of U.S. attorneys when he took office. Because the president and the attorney general insist on acting guilty, the rest of the country has no difficulty in assuming that they are.

Bush, Rove, Gonzales and Co. should explain why the U.S. attorneys were dismissed by emphasizing the importance of the cases they were refusing to prosecute. By doing so, they can turn the Democratic attacks on them into demands to go easy on fraudulent voting. A good sense of public relations -- and some courage -- could turn this issue against the Democrats for blocking Bush's efforts to crack down on the criminals he wanted prosecuted.

In making such a big deal over the routine exercise of a presidential prerogative to fire these prosecutors, the Democrats, led by Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) may be biting off more than they can chew. Unless the administration turns and aggressively defends its decision to get rid of these particular appointees, it could be left holding the bag and defending the U.S. attorneys' decision to avoid prosecuting voter-fraud cases.

If the administration continues to follow its run-and-hide policy, it will look terrible asserting claims of executive privilege as it seeks to shield its appointees from Senate interrogation and its documents from committee scrutiny. But if it contextualizes the issue by using the specific failings of the dismissed appointees to prosecute particular cases, it will assume the high ground and its procedural objections will be seen in a more positive light by the American people. If only the administration would show some courage.

The Speech George Bush Should Make Tuesday Night

Jules Crittenden

The Speech George Bush Should Make Tuesday Night



Don’t bother standing up or clapping, any of you. I already know who won the election, and I know how you feel.

I come before you tonight not to make amends, not to make it good, curry any favor or find any middle ground.

I am, more or less, a lame duck. You’ve had your 100 hours of party time. I know. I won’t get any legislation passed without some major bottom-kissing. Maybe something on illegal aliens. That health insurance thing I’ll be talking about later tonight is pretty much for show. I know it isn’t going anywhere. A proposal to raise middle-class taxes for a healthcare plan you don’t even want? What was I thinking?

None of that really matters. Not now. Those are peacetime issues we’ve been bickering about for a long time, and I don’t expect we’ll resolve them anytime soon.

So what is the best thing I can do tonight? I can tell you the truth. What none of you want to hear. What you’ve been stopping your ears to. The ugly truth.

The State of the Union is a disaster. I did my best, but I made mistakes, and my best wasn’t good enough.

We went to war without building up our army, and now, I am trying to make up for that.

But that is not the disaster.

The disaster is that you, Congress and the American people, do not care to fight.

Faced with a fundamental challenge to our own security, to everything we believe in, to the world order to peace and security for which we and our parents fought so hard for so many years, you now want to pretend like none of these threats are real. You want to surrender to the evil I have been telling you about. An evil that, unchecked, can consume large parts of the world and threatens to usher in a dark age.

You didn’t like it when I talked about evil. Sounded too simple, too uncompromising, too moralistic. Too … biblical.

I don’t know what else you call people who fly passenger jets into office buildings; who rape women in front of their husbands and children, and execute their opponents in acid baths; who seek to spread tyrannical and archaic religious regimes that enslave women and stifle fundamental freedoms. Who want to dominate the world’s primary oil fields with nuclear weapons.

I call it evil. Works for me.

I’ve heard all the comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam. George Bush’s Vietnam. The myopia is astonishing, even for me, George Bush, who you all think just isn’t that smart. But I learned something in school: People who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Didn’t you learn anything from Vietnam? Didn’t you see what happened when your predecessors in Congress, disgruntled and responding to public opinion polls just like you are, voted repeatedly to undermine an ally that was fighting for its survival and making headway against evil? There, I’ve said it again. Millions of people were murdered or imprisoned.

And then, those who wished us ill … the evil-doers … evil, evil evil … took advantage of our weakness.

The Soviet Union, evil personified, invaded Afghanistan, knowing we’d do nothing about it. Iran defied all international norms, took our sovereign embassy and held our people hostage for 444 days. They knew we’d do nothing about it. It was a massive humiliation we have been paying for with our own precious blood ever since.

Where do you think this war we are now engaged in started, anyway? Just ask Osama bin Laden, veteran of the Afghan war against the Soviets, what lesson he learned from two decades of American appeasement and withdrawal in the face of provocation.

Now, you want to negotiate with two of the world’s primary sponsors of terrorism, who are directly involved in support of the terrorists who murder our soldiers. You want to make an arrangement by which we will exit Iraq, and leave it to them. To loot, to murder, to fight over, while the rest of the world’s evil regimes look on, see our weakness, and plot their own moves.

You can try that, with resolutions, by cutting spending for troops in the field, as you seek the short-term satisfaction of withdrawal. But I remain President of the United States, and as long as I am, I will be no lame duck in this fight.

I will engage evil directly where I find it, in Iraq and in Iran. With an aggressive and ruthless new strategy and a plan to build our army as we should have a long time ago, I will show the American people that we can fight and we can win. I expect that the American people, though misled by their press and many of their elected representatives, will see results and will get it. Because the American people are a people who in the end don’t give up, don’t stop fighting, refuse to lose, and will choose to win. I have faith in them.

Oh, there’s another one of those words you don’t like.

A nation that is not willing to fight for what it believes in, for its place in the world, is not worthy of its own ideals. But that is not America. I now intend to help America restore its faith in itself. By fighting this necessary fight that we cannot afford to lose.

So … are you with me, or against us?

Jules Crittenden is an editor and columnist for the Boston Herald.

How 9/11 Changed Bush

Newsweek - MSNBC.com

By Michael Gerson

Five Washington Augusts ago, for me, is not just a different time; it is a distant country. At the White House, we debated the nuances of stem-cell research. The president delivered a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars without the need to mention any foreign wars. Americans obsessed on the mysterious affair of Chandra Levy. A spate of shark attacks was headline news.

Everything we saw took us further from the reality we could not see. Five Augusts ago, hijackers in Florida trained in gyms, bought small knives and practiced flying in rented aircraft. In Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden and Taliban leaders argued about targets and strategy, until bin Laden gave his final orders. Nineteen tickets were booked and purchased, and leftover funds were wired frugally back to Al Qaeda. "And then," as President Bush said, "there came a day of fire."

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, while the president was on the road in Florida, I was working at home on a never-delivered speech announcing a long-forgotten initiative called Communities of Character. Warned by my deputy about the first attack, I headed by car toward the White House, neared the Pentagon and saw a plane in abnormally low descent—so low I could see the windows. Turned around by the police on the highway and sent home, I was finally able to call my evacuated staff at (of all places) the D.C. offices of Chrysler. Then came the first speech to the nation, with too much sentiment, not enough resolve and the president stiff and small. On Friday, a quiet motorcade in the rain to the National Cathedral; and the president filling his office completely; and the whole of official Washington singing, "Glory, glory, hallelujah. His truth is marching on." Starting in those days, I felt not merely part of an administration, but part of a story; a noble story, but with a happy ending by no means assured.

From those events, President Bush drew a fixed conclusion: as long as the Middle East remains a bitter and backward mess, America will not be secure. Dictators in that region survive by finding scapegoats for their failures—feeding conspiracy theories about Americans and Jews—and use religious groups to destroy reformers and democrats. Oil money strengthens elites, buys rockets, funds research into weapons of mass destruction, builds radical schools across Africa and Asia and finds its way to terrorist organizations. Terrorist organizers exploit the humiliated and hopeless—channeling their search for meaning into acts of murder—and plot, as London 2006 proves, to surpass the mad ambitions of 9/11.

In the traditional diplomatic view, this chaos can be contained through the skillful management of "favorable" dictators. But what if the status quo in the Middle East that produced Muhammad Atta and his friends and successors cannot be contained, or boxed up, or bought off? What if the false and shallow stability of tyranny is actually producing people and movements that make the whole world less stable? And what if the problem is getting dramatically worse as the technology of weapons of mass destruction becomes more democratically distributed?

On this theory, President Bush set out a series of policy changes from the weeks after 9/11 to his second Inaugural in 2005. Threats would be confronted before they arrive, the sponsors of terror would be held equally accountable for terrorist murders and America would promote democracy as an alternative to Islamic fascism, the exploitation of religion to impose a violent political utopia. Every element of the Bush doctrine was directed toward a vision: a reformed Middle East that joins the world instead of resenting and assaulting it.

That vision has been tested on nearly every front, by Katyusha rockets in Haifa, car bombs in Baghdad and a crackdown on dissent in Cairo. Condoleezza Rice calls this the "birth pangs" of a new Middle East, and it is a complicated birth. As this violent global conflict proceeds, and its length and costs become more obvious, Americans should keep a few things in mind.

First, the nation may be tired, but history doesn't care. It is not fair that the challenge of Iran is rising with Iraq, bloody and unresolved. But, as President Kennedy used to say, "Life is not fair."

Behind all the chaos and death in Lebanon and northern Israel, Iran is the main cause of worry in the West Wing—the crisis with the highest stakes. Its government shows every sign of grand regional ambitions, pulling together an anti-American alliance composed of Syria, terrorist groups like Hizbullah and Hamas, and proxies in Iraq and Afghanistan. And despite other disagreements, all the factions in Iran—conservative, ultraconservative and "let's usher in the apocalypse" fanatics—seem united in a nuclear nationalism.

Some commentators say that America is too exhausted to confront this threat. But presidential decisions on national security are not primarily made by the divination of public sentiments; they are made by the determination of national interests. And the low blood-sugar level of pundits counts not at all. Here the choice is not easy, but it is simple: can America (and other nations) accept a nuclear Iran?

In foreign-policy circles, it is sometimes claimed that past nuclear proliferation—say, to India or Pakistan—has been less destabilizing than predicted. In the case of Iran, this is wishful thinking. A nuclear Iran would mean a nuclear Middle East, as traditional rivals like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey feel pressured to join the club, giving every regional conflict nuclear overtones. A nuclear Iran would also give terrorist groups something they have previously lacked and desperately want: a great-power sponsor. Over time, this is the surest way to put catastrophic technology into the hands of a murderous few. All options have dangers and drawbacks. But inaction might bring the harshest verdict of history: they knew much, and they did nothing.

The war in Iraq, without doubt, complicates our approach to Iran. It has stretched the Army and lowered our reservoir of credibility on WMD intelligence. But Iran's destabilizing nuclear ambitions are not a guarded secret; they are an announced strategy. If the lesson drawn from Iraq is that the world is too unknowable and complicated for America to act in its interests, we will pay a terrible price down the road.

As these events unfold, our country will need a better way of doing business, a new compact between citizens and their government. Americans have every right to expect competence and honesty about risks and mistakes and failures. Yet Americans, in turn, must understand that in a war where deception is the weapon and goal of the enemy, every mistake is not a lie; every failure is not a conspiracy. And the worst failure would be a timid foreign policy that allows terrible threats to emerge.

There are still many steps of diplomacy, engagement and sanctions between today and a decision about military conflict with Iran—and there may yet be a peaceful solution. But in this diplomatic dance, America should not mirror the infinite patience of Europe. There must be someone in the world capable of drawing a line—someone who says, "This much and no further." At some point, those who decide on aggression must pay a price, or aggression will be universal. If American "cowboy diplomacy" did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

A second point: the promotion of democracy in the Middle East is messy, difficult, but no one has a better idea.

There is no question that democratic societies are more likely to respect human rights, less susceptible to ideological extremism, more respectful of neighboring countries, more easily trusted with nuclear technology.

Yet the democracy agenda is under heavy questioning. Some critics—who might be called soft realists—concede the spread of democracy is desirable. It is just not possible. They argue that democratic governments require democratic cultures, which develop over centuries, and have never developed at all in the Arab Middle East.

Realism, however, is not always identical to pessimism. Arab societies, in fact, have strong traditions of private association, private property and a contractual relationship between ruler and ruled. It is not realism to ignore unprecedented elections in Afghanistan and Iraq and serious reforms elsewhere. The past half century has shown that the cultural obstacles to democracy are less formidable than many predicted, from Roman Catholic Southern Europe to Orthodox Eastern Europe to Confucian Asia. Our times provide strong evidence that liberty improves life and that people in many cultures eventually prefer liberty to slavery. And Americans, of all people, should not be surprised or embarrassed when our deepest beliefs turn out to be true.

Other critics of the democracy agenda—what might be called hard realists—think democracy in the Middle East may be possible, but it is not desirable because elections are likely to bring anti-American radicals like Hamas to power.

It is certainly true that democracy means more than voting. Successful democracies eventually require the rule of law, the protection of minorities, the defeat of corruption, a free press, religious liberty and open economies. Any democracy agenda worthy of the name will promote all these things.

But it is something else to claim that democracy itself is a threat in the Middle East because dictatorships are more stable. This duplicates the argument of the dictators themselves: it is us or the Islamists ... the junta or the jihad. But the choice is false. Political oppression in nations like Egypt has increased the standing and appeal of radicals and forced all opposition into the mosque, while state media continues to provide a steady supply of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. The real choice to be made in the Middle East is between radicals and democrats; both groups have been emboldened by the events of the last five years. We may have limited time to take the side of democratic forces—not merely as an act of altruism, but as an act of self-defense.

Five Augusts from 9/11, in a summer of new fears, in a war on terror that has lasted longer than World War II, public weariness is understandable. And that exhaustion is increasingly reflected in our politics. In a conservative backlash against the president's democratic idealism. In a liberal backlash that has moved from the fringes to the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Ned Lamont, in his primary victory over Sen. Joe Lieberman, summed up the case this way: "We are going to get our troops out of Iraq ... we're going to start investing in our own country again." Lamontism—the elevation of flinching to a foreign policy—is McGovernism, and a long way from "bear any burden, pay any price."

But these political conflicts seem pale and puny in comparison with the broader civilizational conflict that engages us—a reality we cannot claim we do not see. Our enemies set out their goal with neon clarity. To kill, as intended in the London plot, as many as their technology allows. To seek technologies that will make radical Islam a global power, allowing new killing on an unimagined scale. The response of many Americans to all of this is ... up in the air. And, unfortunately, the demands of history may just be beginning, requiring more engagement, more sacrifice, more promotion of democracy, more foreign assistance to raise failed states where dangers gather. Setting out this case will fall to presidents of both parties, in calm and crisis—and making it will always be difficult in a weary hour. But necessity, in the end, makes a stronger argument than the finest rhetoric. And from London to Lebanon, history is proving that peace is not a natural state; it is achieved by a struggle of uncertain duration. In that struggle, the cynical, the world-weary, the risk-averse will not inherit the earth.

Gerson was a speechwriter and policy adviser to President Bush from 2001 until this summer. He is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a NEWSWEEK contributor.

Give the President Some Credit

Debra Saunders on RealClearPolitics

By Debra Saunders

Allow me to explain why I remain among the dwindling numbers of Americans -- about 37 percent, according to the American Research Group -- who approve of the job President Bush is doing.

The death toll of American troops and Iraqis killed by terrorist attacks keeps growing. Voters are fatigued, and Bush is sinking in the opinion polls. Of course it is disheartening to read the casualty numbers every morning, as U.S. troops battle an often invisible enemy that also attacks Iraqis struggling to restore order to their nation.

Antiwar types began calling the situation in Iraq a "quagmire" in the first month of the war. After three years, that term is resonating with the public. It's a fact: This is not a quick, easy war. It has far exceeded the 43-day Persian Gulf War of 1991.

For the record, I do not mean to be critical of war coverage from journalists in Iraq. They are doing the best they can, and their reportage, no doubt, helped reshape military and political strategy for the better. I do, however, object to a Beltway mentality, seen in how Washington journalists report on the politics of the war, which reflects the apparent belief that wars are supposed to go by the book. When television news anchors announce bad news, they usually frame it as a reflection on Bush, not the insurgents.

Or as British Prime Minister Tony Blair put it in a speech this week, insurgency forces "play our own media with a shrewdness that would be the envy of many a political party. Every act of carnage adds to the death toll. But somehow, it serves to indicate our responsibility for disorder, rather than the act of wickedness that causes it. For us, so much of our opinion believes that what was done in Iraq in 2003 was so wrong that it is reluctant to accept what is plainly right now."

Bush does not have the luxury of allowing the bad news to defeat him. Yes, Bush could declare victory and pull out. After all, Saddam Hussein no longer rules. But Bush understands that there can be no victory if Islamic extremists see the United States engage its powerful military, only to bolt when the public gets antsy.

You hear people lamenting about how there is no political leadership anymore. Yet, here it is. Asked at a White House press conference on Tuesday if he thought he had the "political capital" he claimed when he won the 2004 election, Bush answered, "I'd say I'm spending that capital on the war." Indeed, Bush is willing to run his poll numbers into the ground in order to do what he believes he has to do.

Yes, at times Bush drives me crazy, too. His refusal to veto any spending bills fueled a growing deficit. The Bushies were dangerously overconfident about what it would take to win the war in Iraq. They may well have underestimated how many troops were needed in 2003.

This summer, he dropped the ball. He allowed public support for the war to soften. While I think state and local officials carry the blame for infrastructure failures -- a la Katrina -- Bush was flat-footed in responding to the disaster.

Not only will Bush never be as articulate as Blair, he'll never learn how to pronounce "nuclear." Perhaps Bush's biggest political failing has been his inability to get Americans to dislike his critics more than they dislike him -- although I got the feeling Bush was learning the game on Tuesday, when he referred to the National Security Agency wiretap controversy thusly: "I did notice that nobody from the Democratic Party has actually stood up and called for the getting rid of the terrorist surveillance program. You know, if that's what they believe, if people in the party believe that, then they ought to stand up and say it."

Bush nailed it. Since his election, partisan Democrats repeatedly have voted in favor of his proposals -- Iraq, the Patriot Act -- only to snipe at them when they see an opportunity to wound the Republican president. They have every right to criticize policies with which they disagree, but they were not elected to approve a war -- if they weren't willing to do their utmost to win it.

For his part, and with all his faults, the president is trying to do something great. If he succeeds, the world will be a better place. That's what matters.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: Don't blame Bush for these

sacbee.com

* President Bush lied, people died: There are so many facts worth noting on this front, including that in its joint resolution authorizing the war in Iraq in 2002, Congress acknowledged that "the current Iraqi regime has demonstrated its capability and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction against other nations and its own people." That remains a fact - both that Saddam Hussein had, in fact, used weapons of mass destruction against his own people and that the majority of Congress agreed that that was a fact and that in his willingness to have and use WMDs, the Iraqi tyrant was indeed a threat to us.

* Bush hates black people: I got hooked on the PG version of "Golddigger," as much as the next radio listener, but Kanye West is digging deep and with very little to go on when he rants that a racist White House let blacks suffer as Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf coast. There is a lot of finger-pointing to go around, but the tragic story of Katrina has more to do with local corruption, bad infrastructure and bureaucratic bungling than racism. Levee design flaws, dating back to 1993, were also not Bush's fault. Yet, we continue to hear that Katrina was a racist "genocide" perpetrated by the Bush administration.

* The economy is in the tank: Growth and jobs and the stock market are up. Unemployment is down and hovering near historical lows. While the Fed has raised short-term interest rates several times to stave off inflation, long rates remain low. And the so-called housing bubble has yet to pop. Even the New York Times - no parrot of White House talking points - has had to admit that the economy is "booming."

* Bush took August off: He's the president of the United States. We're at war. He meets with foreign dignitaries, communicates and has Cabinet members at the ranch. And the media's there to yell at him like always. He's working. Every day in Crawford is a day at the office.

The list could go on, as it might at your celebrations. But you're on guard now. Maybe you'll be lucky. Look at Kanye across the table and remind him of all those unused buses in New Orleans - the ones that could have evacuated people, but were instead left to sit in a flooded lot. Then maybe you can both retire to the living room for Scrabble or xeroxing at the office.

Bush 'lied'?

The San Diego Union-Tribune

It's time to refute this slander about Iraq war

Not so long ago, only the extreme left and inveterate Bush haters accused the president of deliberately lying to justify going to war in Iraq. But now, with Bush weakened politically and his adversaries smelling blood, the "Bush lied" mantra is verging toward mainstream among opposition Democrats.

It's long past time, then, for Bush to fight back, and not just because the loose charge of lying is beginning to cut. Bush must answer because his moral authority, political credibility and American honor are all at stake here. So, too, is a momentous question of history: Whether the United States and its principal ally, Britain, went to war against Iraq in bad faith.

The core of the charge that Bush lied is tied to Saddam Hussein's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. Saddam's WMDs were a principal justification cited by Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and others who supported removing Saddam and his regime by force. As everyone now knows, extensive searches in Iraq after Saddam's fall found no WMDs.

But that hardly proves Bush lied. Rather it shows only that he was, apparently, mistaken. So, also, was a host of others, including the president's most important intelligence and national security advisers. When pressed by Bush before the Iraq war on whether Saddam had WMDs, CIA Director George Tenet famously replied, "It's a slam dunk."

British intelligence was telling Blair the same thing. Indeed, most if not all of the world's major intelligence services – the French and Germans, among them – believed Saddam was concealing WMDs. So did the United Nations Security Council, which is why it kept passing resolutions for a dozen years demanding that Iraq permit unfettered weapons inspections. Repeated U.N. weapons inspection reports through the 1990s noted the huge amounts of chemical weapons components and suspected biological agents that were unaccounted for.

Many of those in Congress who now darkly suggest that Bush somehow lied about Iraq saw much of the same intelligence the White House had, and then voted for the war. More than 100 Democrats in the Senate and House, including the Bush-Cheney ticket's opponents last fall, voted authority for Bush to use force against Saddam.

Did Bush distort or manipulate the intelligence on Iraq that he received? Either might be construed as a form of lying. But the evidence is just the opposite. The bipartisan Silberman-Robb commission reported that it found no evidence of political pressure by the Bush administration or the president to falsify or distort intelligence on Iraq. A similarly independent investigation in Britain exonerated Blair of comparable accusations.

Belatedly, Bush has begun fighting back. In a Veterans Day speech, the president effectively refuted the scurrilous accusation that he lied the country into war. If his critics have any evidence to the contrary, let them produce it. While we're waiting – it could be a long wait – we hope Bush continues to vigorously defend himself and his administration from those trying, as the president said, to rewrite history.