Although you gotta admit that there is a big contrast between these two arguments:

a) I didn’t have good intelligence, and I made a serious mistake because of it

b) I didn’t have good intelligence, but I don’t regret anything I did based on bad intelligence

Which one do you want making the next decision for you?

You know I love you, Jack, and we are closer on this than you think. My problem here is that neither side is willing to face the fact that everyone had problems here. For instance, on Fox News Sunday (and for my taste, Wallace frere isn’t as bad as some claim) Senator Rockefeller stated that he made pre-war trips to Syria, Jordan amd Saudi Arabia allerting those countries that war with Iraq was a fait accompli.

Investigations anyone? My point is that it isn’t just the “Rovians and dittoheads” that are making us sick. There are demagogues to go around on this. If we want to have in hearings and whathot afterwards, I’m all for that. This is what modern politics gets us. We have a paralytic president and an opposition party that doesn’t understand the word “loyal.”

In the midst of this, we have Democrats (my party, by the way)claiming that they were duped by a president that they consider deficient.

Some rallying cry: The Democrats: Dumber than Bush!

First Bush is a hands off president so he probably did not look closely at data and sources.

Second of all the comments of Colenel Wilkerson and quite a few others through the years does not prove lies, it does indicate a selection of individuals and data that reinforced certain views.

We have seen the desire to suppress unwelcome opinions in the acts against Wilson, Sheniski, Lawrence Lindsay and quite a few others. Tragically as Fallows describes in Blind Into Baghdad this meant ignoring the opinion of the army war college, the state department and other usual authorities on the situation in post war Iraq. We saw the replacement of “professionals” with politically correct cadre and now in the CIA among other places.

Yet this is not specifically lying. Bureaucracies get balanced according to perceptions. I truly fear the choices may have been disasters, there is growing fear Chalabi was always an Iranian agent.

But if in fact this corruption of our system is the real danger, then the partisan desire to “get” Bush to focus on this detail and that is as destructive as the rightwing dittohead insistence that any criticism of how the war was waged or proposal to improve the effort was treason.

The left historically has only been marginally concerned with the national security issues that are at stake. There is a real danger the Bush administration has crippled outr national security, but whether he did so cynically or immorally or with sincere good intentions is a footnote; the issue is the state these possible purges may have left our system in.

And it is not an easy situation to evaluate because even many of the fiercest critics of Bush also claim serious flaws in the old infrastructure. Plus the Church committee method of dragging these things out in public did not prove the best road to success.

Reid’s call for investigation administration distortion of the agencies in gathering pre war evidence is a necessary step as are increasing warnings from the establishment such as General Scowcroft on dangerous assumptions and policies. But these are not primarily a matter of perfidy on the part of the president nor are they a blanket indictment of his choices that somehow prove his fiercest critics were always correct.

That never been wrong and the other side being evil is exactly the attitude that makes so many of us sick of the Rovians and dittoheads.

The assertion that some parties are “rewriting history” merits closer examination. Please make that examination rather than regurgitating the “talking points” which is the…