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Bush's Mis-State-Ment Of The Union Fiasco

By Arianna Huffington

Poor Karl Rove. He spends close to two years meticulously staging photo
ops and carefully crafting sound bites to create the image of President
Bush as a take-charge, man-the-controls,
land-the-jet-on-the-deck-of-the-aircraft carrier, "Bring 'em on" kind of
leader. But now the latest revelations about the Misstatement of the Union
fiasco are threatening to bring back the old notion of W as a bumbling,
detached figurehead-in-chief.

And it's the president's own people who are painting this unflattering
portrait.

Take George Tenet: While robotically impaling himself on his sword, the
CIA director took great pains to point out that he thought so little of
the Niger/Saddam uranium connection that he and his deputies refused to
bring it up in congressional briefings as far back as fall 2002. It just
didn't meet his standards.

Same with Colin Powell. The Secretary went on at great length about the
intense vetting process -- "four days and three nights" locked up with the
leaders of the CIA, working "until midnight, 1 o'clock every morning,"
going over "every single thing we knew about all of the various issues
with respect to weapons of mass destruction" -- that went into deciding
what information would be used in his United Nations presentation. A
presentation that ultimately did not include the Niger allegation because
it was not, in Powell's words "standing the test of time."

Hmmm, just how hard is that test? Powell's UN speech came a mere eight
days after Bush's State of the Union -- leaving one to wonder what the
expiration date is on patently phony data? About a week after a president
uses it, it turns out.

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