White House sticks to Iraq defense

The response to Bush's Veteran's Day speech attacking critics of the Iraq War didn't go down too well this time. It was a recitation of lines that have been standard adminsitration talking points for a couple of years now, but the press is finally acknowledging that most of them are misleading half-truths at best.

How is the White House responding to this latest show of insolence by the journos? Unspurprisingly, by repeating the talking points once again.

So rather than ignoring critiques like those in the Post Saturday, the White House seems to understand now that it has to take them on. Yesterday, it did just that, posting on the White House Web site a document titled "Setting the Record Straight: The Washington Post on Pre-War Intelligence." But as you might expect by now, the White House push-back doesn't do much to set the record straight at all.

The Post analysis said that Bush does not share his "most sensitive intelligence, including the President's Daily Brief, with lawmakers"; that the administration didn't provide Congress the flawed 2002 National Intelligence Estimate until just days before the vote on the authorization for war; that the NIE didn't reflect "doubts within the intelligence community"; and that even the doubts that were set forth in the NIE couldn't have been used in public debate in Congress because some of the information was deemed classified until the eve of the Senate vote.

One interesting aspect of the story is that the press has noted that the White House and the Senate having the exact same intelligence is actually pretty troubling. And it's the White House insisting that it's the case.