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"Tony Blair"

When did Tony become a point man for being right.. the last I looked, he was invovled with Clinton, in his there-way politics my-way BS... And now he supports Bush, so I have to believe all is well, just because he says so... Sorry I don't buy that crock of horsesh**.. you know that strips and never changin thingy...

Ah, but who would you rather tie your wagon to, if you were Blair? Clinton or Bush? Being connected to Clinton for eternity is not necessarily a glowing description. Supporting Bush in the War on Terror, will help him go down in history. Kind of like Reagan and Thatcher.

Read my post again. I never said Mr. Blair was right, just that he is sticking by his intel that tells him Saddam was trying to purchase nuke materials.

If he really cared about what clinton wants or thinks, Blair would have sided with Amb. Wilson and others to discredit GWB. Since trying to discredit GWB is clinton's full time job at this point.

Politics is such a tricky thing, sure Blair likes to suck up to the toon, it makes his leftie buddies gleeful. However Blair is smart enough to know which side his scone is buttered on. That would be the side where he sides with the U.S. no matter who's prez because he understands the importance of ridding the world of terrorists.

Sorry I don't buy that crock of horsesh**.. you know that strips and never changin thingy...

Don't be such a nave, sometimes politicians do what's right.

Then there's this little tidbit in the July 11th Washington Post story about the CIA's effort to get the British to strip the reference to the Niger purchase from their official government dossier:

"We consulted about the paper and recommended against using that material," a senior administration official familiar with the intelligence program said. The British government rejected the U.S. suggestion, saying it had separate intelligence unavailable to the United States.

Putting the two stories together it seems reasonable to believe that the CIA was running around warning various people at various times about the "sketchy" nature of the Niger intel, but that there also still existed at least some evidence in September 2002 suggesting that the Niger story wasn't totally bogus. It also seems that there was some general confusion among the various high-level players in the administration as to who had seen which drafts of the speech, when they'd seen them and what they'd approved or thought had been approved.

Based on what we know so far, you can either believe that a mistake was made by allowing a claim based on questionable intelligence into Bush's State of the Union OR you can believe the President of the United States got up in front of the world and knowingly used information that had already been proved to be completely fraudulent to bolster the case for going to war.

In my mind the more plausible answer is that the administration failed to properly coordinate and vet the intelligence used in the speech. A mistake was made. The administration has admitted such. Does the fact that it was the SOTU magnify the mistake? Yes. And does the fact that it was related to the issue of going to war magnify the error even more? Of course.

It is certainly the right of liberals and Democrat presidential candidates to believe there was a vast conspiracy to mislead the American public and to scream "BUSH LIED" at the top of their lungs, but it strikes me as a little overly dramatic (even bordering on hysterical) and may not play quite as well with the public as they hope.

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Hmmmmmmm, a little overly dramatic, sounds like a certain 19 year old journalist.