WASHINGTON (Reuters) - After weeks of blaming others, President Bush for the first time accepted responsibility on Wednesday for making a now-discredited charge that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa.

President Bush and his Republican Party are facing a political backlash from an unlikely group - retired veterans.

Normally Republican, many retired veterans are mad that Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress are blocking remedies to two problems with health and pension benefits. They say they feel particularly betrayed by Bush, who appealed to them in his 2000 campaign, and who vowed on the eve of his inauguration that "promises made to our veterans will be promises kept."

"He pats us on the back with his speeches and stabs us in the back with his actions," said Charles A. Carter of Shawnee, Okla., a retired Navy senior chief petty officer. "I will vote non-Republican in a heart beat if it continues as is." (My bolding)

Now some people on the left are saying, well, the real reason was the possession of Iraqi oil. Or, the real reason was to seal the 2002 election or the 2004 election. Various other real reasons have been and are being proffered. But these are at best secondary or tertiary reasons.

[A]ccording to the White House, ...national security advisor Condoleeza Rice [was too busy to read the entire October National Intelligence Estimate]. She's supposed to be the brains of the operation, Bush's intellectual nanny. The former provost of Stanford University, we're told, skipped the footnotes where the strongest cautions were found. Assuming purely for the sake of argument that we believe this astonishing excuse, exactly what does the woman do all day? Have we reached the point where we expect American men and women to commit their lives and sacred honor on the basis of what Bob Somerby calls "Cliff's Notes" intelligence?

But the reality, of course, is that Rice's story simply cannot be believed. CIA director Tenet had personally warned her chief deputy Stephen Hadley off the African uranium tale on two documented occasions in October 2002. Nor is this the first time Rice has been caught uttering improbable stories in defense of her boss. Seemingly above criticism, it was Rice, Joe Conason points out, who pushed the later repudiated tale that Bush hightailed it to Nebraska on 9/11 because of "intelligence" indicating terrorists had targeted Air Force One.

It was also Rice who insisted that nobody could possibly have imagined a plot so fiendish as to crash jetliners into buildings, although the president had slept aboard a Navy vessel during his visit to Genoa, Italy during the 2001 G-8 summit for precisely that reason. It was Rice who warned that not to attack Iraq would be to risk a "mushroom cloud" over an American city, who pushed the dubious story about Iraq importing aluminum tubes to manufacture nuclear weapons long after experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency had pronounced them technically unsuitable, and who went on "Meet the Press" to deny knowing anything about Ambassador Joseph Wilson's debunking trip to Niger at the CIA's behest weeks after Nicholas Kristof had written about it in the New York Times.

1. How many visits did you and your chief of staff make to CIA to meet directly with CIA analysts working on Iraq?
   
2. What was the purpose of each of these visits?
   
3. Did you or a member of your staff at any time direct or encourage CIA analysts to disseminate unreliable intelligence?
   
4. Did you or a member of your staff at any time request or demand rewriting of intelligence assessments concerning the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
   
5. Who in the office of Vice President was informed of the contents of Ambassador Wilson's report?
   
6. What efforts were made by your office to disseminate the findings of Ambassador Wilson's investigation to the President, National Security Adviser, and Secretary of Defense?
   
7. Did your office regard Ambassador Wilson's conclusions as accurate or inaccurate?
   
8. Since your address to the [103d National Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars on August 26, 2002] occurred nearly 7 months after Ambassador Wilson reported his findings to the CIA and State Department, what evidence did you have for the assertion that Iraq was continuing "to pursue the nuclear program" and that Saddam had "resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons"?
   
9. Since the Secretary of Defense testified to Congress that Iraq was "pursuing nuclear weapons" nearly 8 months after Ambassador Wilson's briefing to CIA and the State Department, what effort did you make to determine what evidence the Secretary of Defense had for his assertion to Congress?
   
10. What was the basis for this assertion made by you on national television [IAEA Director General ElBaradei was wrong in finding a revived nuclear weapons program in Iraq unlikely]? We hope you will take the opportunity to answer these questions about your role in the dissemination of false information about Iraq's nuclear program to justify the war in Iraq. We look forward to a response.

What has been propping up the President in the past few months is his personal favorability rating. To me, what is most ominous is this alone has slipped nine points in the past month. If he cannot count on a large majority of Americans to like him personally, this could spell doom for his re-election hopes because he has little support for his overall performance and how he is rated on the issues.

• It doesn’t matter. Saddam was a bad man and now he’s gone. Woo-hoo, we’re number one!
  
• The investigation of the document was done by a low level intelligence operative and never percolated up to the administration (it was done by an ambassador who was under the impression he was working directly for Cheney).
  
• The President had other evidence and wasn’t referring to the Niger document (no one has suggested what that evidence might be and this story has been dropped).
  
• The State of the Union Address was the work of Bush and a close circle of aids, so those who knew the truth never had an opportunity to correct it (it was finished ten days before being given and widely circulated).
  
• The CIA knew it was wrong and let Bush give the speech anyway; it’s all George Tenent’s fault; George, fall on this sword (George doesn’t seem to be going along with this).
  
• Although the CIA knew better, the British were fooled and Bush depended on the British for his intelligence, not on his own multi-billion-dollar intelligence agencies. It’s all Tony Blair’s Fault; Tony, fall on this sword (same as above).
  
• History will vindicate us (not if I can help it).

"Bring 'em on"? I'm so glad that President Bush has "restored dignity" to the White House, and I have no doubt the families of servicemen and women in Iraq must feel the same way today.
No wonder some Republicans think Arnold Schwarzenegger should be running the state of California. The real question is why we don't elect an actual cartoon character to office instead of all these cheap imitations. The Hulk's movie may be mediocre, but he obviously possesses the cool temperament, precise diction and witty style of a great commander in chief.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush on Wednesday challenged militants who have been killing and injuring U.S. forces in Iraq, saying "bring them on" because American forces were tough enough to deal with their attacks.

"There are some who feel like that conditions are such that they can attack us there," Bush told reporters at the White House. "My answer is 'bring them on'. We have the force necessary to deal with the situation."

Bush Asks Congress For $30 Billion To Help Fight War On Criticism
WASHINGTON, DC—Citing the need to safeguard "America's most vital institutions and politicians" against potentially devastating attacks, President Bush asked Congress to sign off Monday on a $30 billion funding package to help fight the ongoing War On Criticism.

"Sadly, the threat of criticism is still with us," Bush told members of Congress during a 2 p.m. televised address. "We thought we had defeated criticism with our successes in Afghanistan and Iraq. We thought we had struck at its very heart with the broad discretionary powers of the USA Patriot Act. And we thought that the ratings victory of Fox News, America's News Channel, might signal the beginning of a lasting peace with the media. Yet, despite all this, criticism abounds."

[…]

Ashcroft said the Justice Department, working closely with the CIA and FBI, has identified more than 300 potential targets, ranging from the Bush Administration's inability to produce the weapons of mass destruction used to justify the war with Iraq to its deficit-ballooning fiscal policies.

[…]

"I doubt I could protect my ongoing Halliburton cronyism from critical strikes with just a few million dollars—especially if it was not accompanied by powerful preemptive legislation," Vice-President Dick Cheney said. "We need to build stronger anti-criticism defense shields in this country. And the time to act is now, before the media say something negative about us."

ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) -- A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that a Ten Commandments monument the size of a washing machine must be removed from the Alabama Supreme Court building.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed a ruling by a federal judge who said that the 2 1/2-ton granite monument, placed there by Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, violates the constitutional separation of church and state.

In its opinion today, the court rejected Moore’s assertion that government acknowledgements of religion have a long history in America. “Chief Justice Moore has pointed to no evidence that the Ten Commandments in any form were publicly displayed in any state or federal courthouse, much less that the practice of displaying them was widespread at the time the Bill of Rights was proposed and adopted,” declared the court.

The court also soundly rejected Moore’s contention that as chief judicial officer of Alabama, he is not bound by federal court rulings, comparing it to “the same position taken by those southern governors who attempted to defy federal court orders during an earlier era.”