on Tim Russert’s Meet the Press, which might be renamed “Meet the whiffleball” before you read this.

Anyhow, true to form, the President misdirected and outright lied even the face of Mr Russert’s softballs. Amazing but true. Luckily, there are people keeping track of these misstatements and such:
CLAIM vs. FACT: The President on Meet the Press

his panel to study what went wrong with the intelligence surrounding the pre-war period, and it seems relatively well made up. I wonder, though, if the focus has already predetermined an unsatisfactory outcome. They are starting with the assumption that the intel was inaccurate, when in fact the problem is very likely not the intel itself but the interpretation of the information further up.

Supporters of the war have been shrill about it: “Clinton had the SAME information; this action MUST be OK! The only difference is that Bush has BALLS where Clinton had none!!” But that’s the point – Clinton may have had the same info – it’s what was done with it that is at issue. By circumventing built-in controls in the system, the Bush administration made shockingly bad decisions based on information that was as correct – but with little confidence attached – as it had ever been.

So suggesting that it was “bad intel” alone is already beside the point, and dooms the panel to insignificance. Hope not – but it seems to. Last night the Republican guy was already trotting out the well-worn “it has to be above politics” line. Problem is – this whole thing was all about political people making bad decisions with as-good-as-possible information, bad as that always has been.

brought to the table by Tom Tomorrow about the fallout from the David Kay testimony before Congress and the allegations that Rumsfeld cooked the intel books in the runup to the Iraq war.

…if you’ve paid attention over the past few days, you’ve seen the mainstream media timidly and dutifully reporting the current conventional wisdom–that there is no proof that the Bushies cherry-picked the intel and/or pressured intelligence agencies to tell them what they wanted to hear.
[…]
It’s not some craaaazy conspiracy theory–it’s a reported and substantiated fact that Rumsfeld set up his own intel-gathering unit because he wasn’t happy with what the CIA was giving him.

As most know, the US has been running a huge deficit throughout the Bush years, putting the lie to the idea of fiscally responsible conservatism year after year. But is it an honest shortfall or was it intentional all along? Have the Bush deficits really been simply an attempt to provoke a budget crisis? The news today – Record Deficit Forces Cuts in Bush Budget – hints that those fears may have been well-founded.