Kindergarten Cops

In the wake of the NIE saying Iran hasn't been pursuing nuclear weapons for four years, Josh Marshall deconstructs Bush:

"Oh, for the days when the need to parse presidential language was only a matter of distinguishing different kinds of sex acts. Now it's necessary to hold the president to account for starting wars, bamboozling the country and causing untold numbers of deaths.

"We appear to know now that the Iranians shuttered their nuclear weapons program in 2003. The president apparently had strong indications this was the case back as far as last summer and the intelligence became progressively more clear in the fall. And yet here he was through most of the fall escalating his rhetoric against Iran and rattling the sabers for a potential military confrontation.

"Yet, as several readers have noted, when you look back at his speeches, there's evidence that the president was shifting his terms because he knew that the intelligence on which his push for war was based was likely too collapse.

"If you go back to his October 17th press conference, the one where he spoke of 'World War III' he changes his wording. It's no longer the need to prevent the Iranians from getting the bomb. Now it's the necessity of ' preventing them from hav[ing] the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.'

"That's the tell. That change is no accident."

What about Bill Clinton saying he was against the war from the beginning? Discussing the flap over his recent remarks on whether he originally opposed the war, he said: "Well, I regret that they were falsely represented by the press, who wants to make it a political story."

Leaving aside that it is a political story when a former president is campaigning for a wife who wants to be president, Clinton cites a pre-war statement that the weapons inspectors should be given time to do their job.

The biggest media newsmakers in the third quarter, says the Project for Excellence in Journalism, were Bush (513 stories), Larry Craig (293), Hillary (220), Michael Vick (162) and O.J. (153). The only other presidential candidates in the top 10 were Obama (110 stories) and Fred Thompson (101).

Paul Krugman takes his NYT colleague Kit Seelye to task for writing:

" Joseph Antos, a health policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a nonpartisan group. . .

"Is it really possible for a veteran reporter to believe that AEI is nonpartisan? Not even a qualifier, like 'right-leaning' or 'free-market-oriented'?"