A Compelling Story

"Card's whole White House career had been leading up to this hari-kari moment. He repeatedly told interviewers that he worked hard not to become Bush's friend, 'because he has to have the courage to fire me when I'm not doing the job well.' Over the course of several meetings, it was Card who had to convince Bush to accept his resignation. Finally, Bush told the world what Card always knew in his heart and wanted the rest of the world to know, too: Everything was his fault."

Repeating It Doesn't Make It So

Joe Conason writes in Salon: "President Bush persists in blatantly falsifying the war's origins -- perhaps because, even now, he still gets away with it."

Conason takes issue with Bush's statement in his press conference last week that Saddam Hussein "chose to deny inspectors . . . chose not to disclose."

Writes Conason: "For the third time since the war began three years ago, Bush had falsely claimed that Saddam refused the U.N. weapons inspections mandated by the Security Council. For the third time, he had denied a reality witnessed by the entire world during the four months when those inspectors, under the direction of Hans Blix, traveled Iraq searching fruitlessly for weapons of mass destruction that, as we now know for certain, were not there."

The first time, Conasan writes, came in a July 2003 photo op .

The following day, Dana Priest and Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post: "The president's assertion that the war began because Iraq did not admit inspectors appeared to contradict the events leading up to war this spring: Hussein had, in fact, admitted the inspectors and Bush had opposed extending their work because he did not believe them effective."

But since then, Conason writes that the "lazy and intimidated press corps" has let Bush get away with a bald-faced lie.

"Historians will wonder someday how a free press permitted the world's most important official to say such things without contradiction."