Keep your eye on the (spin) ball

The wingnutterati has apparently launched a new talking points attack in an effort to keep some of the slime from the culture of corruption from sticking to the Bush Cheney administration. And if you have a dishonest talking point - in this case, a flat out lie - that you need to paint with some sort of illusion of validity, your go-to-guy from the punditocracy is apparently Bill Kristol. (Hat tip, as so often is the case, to Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, linked above.)

Kristol, regarding whether or not Bushco manufactured and/or manipulated evidence to support the existence of WMDs in Iraq to justify the war:

"After all, the bipartisan Silberman-Robb commission found no evidence of political manufacture and manipulation of intelligence."

Unfortunately for Bill, this time he's stuck his tongue to the frozen flag pole. Here's what the report actually said.

We were not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the Intelligence Community. Accordingly, while we interviewed a host of current and former policymakers during the course of our investigation, the purpose of those interviews was to learn about how the Intelligence Community reached and communicated its judgments about Iraq's weapons programs--not to review how policymakers subsequently used that information.

Kristol's statement is an out and out lie - exactly the opposite of the truth. Spin is one thing. People try to shape their commentary about events which influence politics all the time. They can do that by highlighting some facts and diminishing (or even ignoring) other items which don't support their premise. That's somewhat disingenuous, but at least it still dances with the truth. This is just flat out lying to try to slow the sinking of the HMS Bush amid the flotsam and jetsam of the Nigergate scandal.

Speaking of Nigergate, be sure to check out this Knight Ridder report, where we get confirmation, yet again, that the forged Niger uranium documents were known to be "such crude forgeries" months ahead of the invasion of Iraq. Bush knew. Cheney knew. Rumsfeld knew. They all knew, they said nothing, and they launched the war anyway.

TREASON. Plan and simple.