WaPo moves out of the Bush Love Shack

There was a time when the Washington Post would never have pointed out Bushit such as we heard from the Madman-in-Chief yesterday.

Times have changed:

President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence.

Neither assertion is wholly accurate.

The administration's overarching point is true: Intelligence agencies overwhelmingly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and very few members of Congress from either party were skeptical about this belief before the war began in 2003. Indeed, top lawmakers in both parties were emphatic and certain in their public statements.

But Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material. And the commissions cited by officials, though concluding that the administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to change their conclusions, were not authorized to determine whether the administration exaggerated or distorted those conclusions.

There's too much good stuff here to excerpt all of it, so go read the whole thing.

None of this exonerates the spineless Democrats who voted to authorize this war when hundreds of thousands of people who marched in New York City and elsewhere before the war started knew that the Bush Administration's claims were outright lies, ESPECIALLY John Kerry, who made an impassioned speech about the rush to war -- and then voted for it anyway, because he was too cowed by this Administration to do what's right.

However, for the Bush Administration to point its fingers at Democrats for its own corrupt decision-making apparatus is appalling for an administration which came to office promising accountability with adults in charge.