more lies and evasion from the White House on Iraq intel assessment

from the Post's Whitehouse Briefing

Douglas Jehl and David E. Sanger write in the New York Times: "A draft of the executive order Mr. Bush is preparing to sign this week to create the commission makes no explicit reference to a study of how the intelligence assessments were used. Instead, it only directs the panel to compare intelligence findings about Iraq produced before the war with the absence of stockpiles of unconventional weapons found by American inspection teams on the ground."

In other words, the commission could conceivably choose not to examine "a highly charged political issue: whether President Bush and other senior administration officials exaggerated the evidence that Iraq possessed large stockpiles of illicit weapons."

and also

Richard Leiby, The Washington Post's "Reliable Source," has a more recent possible contender:
"Asked yesterday by a reporter whether 'the country is owed an explanation about the Iraq intelligence failures,' President Bush said, 'Well, first of all, I want to know all the facts. . . . What we don't know yet is what we thought and what the Iraqi Survey Group has found, and we want to look at that.' "

and the Oscar for lies, damned lies, and obfuscation goes to Scott McClellan for yesterday's appaling press conference.

We have to replace this president

The Post had a piece today analyzing the cuts the Bush budget wants to make in federal programs. Sounds like, basically, only the ones that deal with early education, science and math education, housing, poor people, kids, law enforcement; just nonessential stuff.

Meanwhile they also discovered that Bush plans on not only stalling an investigation of the Iraq war intel until after the election, not just divert away from how the administration used the intel or even away from Iraq altogether, but he will be personally appointing all its members himself. How much more bipartisan and nonpolitical can you get than to have the official who lied and decieved his electorate appoint the commission that is supposed to investigate him? Shades of Richard Nixon!