Thanks, Bumiller: "I am here to tell you [Bush] reads the newspapers"

MediaMatters redesigned their excellent website and now it's still excellent. If 'the good guys' are ever going to get a grip on the spin cycle, sites that apply Fair Use to capture and reapply video clips are crucial.

In this case, they caught NY Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller informing Chris Matthews that she was 'here' to let him know that Bush actually skims newspapers. In any other country the host might scoff about that.

We have a lot of catching up to do before the Kool Kids get it. WaPo's Dana Milbank spoke in Minnesota the other day, and it was rebroadcast on MPR today. The audience questioned Milbank about how long she thought it would take before people fully understood how this war started. Milbank responded that she still hadn't seen anything that indicated they had manipulated intelligence -- most of The Mistake was already clearly understood. Besides, she said, this Office of Special Plans thing was sooo small, how could it have manipulated the Big American Government (and the infallible Dinner Party Junta that runs the country)?

She claimed that the CIA's National Intelligence Estimate to Congress proved it was mainly the Agency's fault for hyping the intel (which they only hyped because they low-balled Iraq's WMD in the 1990s).

Again, whenever these establishment types refer to the Silberman Report or the Senate Intel Committee Report, they are making a basic 'appeal to authority' argument that absolves everyone in the Bush Administration from how they systematically, mendaciously exaggerated the Saddam Threat. Likewise, the NIE sort of pins the blame on the CIA, but in reality the NIE was but one slice of the broad War Selling effort.

So there are two main, competing narratives: the "war intel was spoofed mainly by Iraqi exiles and neo-cons" narrative that I've tried to illustrate on this site, and DC's shiny answer, "the CIA was a little bit stoned, and then we invaded. Oops," narrative.

The problem is that over the past couple months, the whole 'innocent mistake' narrative has been dissolving, and the 'war intel was spoofed' narrative is now much stronger. Scooter Libby's indictment was fallout from the 'dirty fight' that the neo-cons and the war's partisans fought in 2002 and 2003, the somewhat esoteric 'information war' that Rove, Cheney, Libby, the 'White House Iraq Group,' Woolsey, Perle, Feith & the Office of Special Plans, and media pawns like Robert Novak fought to defend the old "Saddam == Al Qaeda == Teh Satan!! OMG!!" narrative.

More later...