Faux Mea Culpa

Sincerity is all that counts. It's a wide-spread modern heresy. Think again. Bolsheviks are sincere. Fascists are sincere. Lunatics are sincere. People who believe the earth is flat are sincere. They can't all be right.
Tom Driberg (1905 - 1976), British politician and journalist

What did he know and when did he know it?

If it is widely known now by the public that Bush used bad info, then he obviously knew a long time ago. If he is truly taking responsibility then it is time to clean house and get rid of a vice president a defense secretary that steamed roll over evidence and expert advice to push forward a failed plan, but he is not.

This is a clear case of a public relations stunt to raise his poll numbers so his gang can get odious legislation passed.

The white house gang knows that celebrities are forgiven for their trespasses of drugs, prostitutes and old girlfriends and boyfriends, so they are looking for their absolution. The American people will be foolish to approve anything more from this gang.

From Frank Rice’s Nov. 27th column in the New York Times
...There is more going on here than politics.

Much more: each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren't, in Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless. The more the president and vice president tell us that their mistakes were merely innocent byproducts of the same bad intelligence seen by everyone else in the world, the more we learn that this was not so. The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House. The real point of the Bush-Cheney verbal fisticuffs this month, like the earlier campaign to take down Joseph Wilson, is less to smite Democrats than to cover up wrongdoing in the executive branch between 9/11 and shock and awe.

The cover-up is failing, however. No matter how much the president and vice president raise their decibel levels, the truth keeps roaring out. A nearly 7,000-word investigation in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times found that Mr. Bush and his aides had ''issued increasingly dire warnings'' about Iraq's mobile biological weapons labs long after U.S. intelligence authorities were told by Germany's Federal Intelligence Service that the principal source for these warnings, an Iraqi defector in German custody code-named Curveball, ''never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.'' The five senior German intelligence officials who spoke to The Times said they were aghast that such long-discredited misinformation from a suspected fabricator turned up in Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations and in the president's 2003 State of the Union address (where it shared billing with the equally bogus 16 words about Saddam's fictitious African uranium).

Be afraid, be very very afraid.