"Fact-esque"

Via Josh Marshall, Knight-Ridder takes a look at various assertions made by the White House in what Stephen Hadley called the "sustained campaign" to push back on calls that the administration misled the American people into war.

I think at one point, the Knight-Ridder reporters use the quaint word, "bogus."

Last night, Cheney ratcheted up the noise machine.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 - Vice President Dick Cheney joined the White House attack on critics of the Iraq war Wednesday night when he told a conservative group that senators who had suggested that the Bush administration manipulated prewar intelligence were making "one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city."

Trouble for Cheney, though, is that when Elisabeth Bumiller is no longer simply playing stenographer for you, the rhetoric falls apart pretty quickly.

In his speech, Mr. Cheney echoed the argument of Mr. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in the past week that Democrats had access to the same prewar intelligence that the White House did, and that they came to the same conclusion that Mr. Hussein was a threat.

The administration, however, had access to far more extensive intelligence than Congress did. The administration also left unaddressed the question of how it had used that intelligence, which was full of caveats, subtleties and contradictions. Many Democrats now say they believe they had been misled by the administration in the way it presented the prewar intelligence.

One must wonder, does the Cheney administration think it's still running for something? Because they are the ones "playing politics" with a coordinated effort by the White House and the Republican party apparatus to avoid addressing the real charges being leveled here, that they manipulated evidence to convince Congress and voters that Saddam was an imminent threat, and instead use out-of-context quotes from the opposition to try to make them look "reprehensible."