Lying liars: Everything George Bush knows he learned in grade school. If you’re accused of lying, the best way out is to lie some more – only this time like you really mean it.

That’s what the president did on Friday in his politically laden Veteran’s Day address. Accused of lying about the reasons he took the country to war, the president chose to lie some more – only this time with gusto:

Bush asserted that “more than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.” Giving a preview of Bush’s speech, Hadley had said that “we all looked at the same intelligence.”

But Bush does not share his most sensitive intelligence, such as the President’s Daily Brief, with lawmakers. Also, the National Intelligence Estimate summarizing the intelligence community’s views about the threat from Iraq was given to Congress just days before the vote to authorize the use of force in that country.

In addition, there were doubts within the intelligence community not included in the NIE. And even the doubts expressed in the NIE could not be used publicly by members of Congress because the classified information had not been cleared for release. For example, the NIE view that Hussein would not use weapons of mass destruction against the United States or turn them over to terrorists unless backed into a corner was cleared for public use only a day before the Senate vote.

He also fibbed about the results of an investigation into the pre-war intelligence when he “implied that it had been proved that the administration did not manipulate intelligence, saying that those who suggest the administration ‘manipulated the intelligence’ are ‘fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community’s judgments.”

[But the] only committee investigating the matter in Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has not yet done its inquiry into whether officials mischaracterized intelligence by omitting caveats and dissenting opinions. And Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of Bush’s commission on weapons of mass destruction, said in releasing his report on March 31, 2005: “Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry.”

At least the mainstream media isn’t falling for this Bushit like they did before the war. Better late than never! (Except for service members who was killed in Bush’s bogus war, of course.)

This is sick:

As the members of the House of Representatives fled Washington … leaving the federal budget process in disarray, lots of spinning was going on. The most remarkable story appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, where Representative Richard Pombo [R-CA] attributed the collapse of the Republican budget process to the fact that, after the House leadership removed Arctic and coastal oil drilling to obtain the votes of moderate Republicans, he and his fellow conservative members of the House Committee on Resources told House Whip Roy Blunt that he could not longer count on their votes for a bill that failed to contain “American energy production.”

West Wing leak: Remember how the Bush White House used to be virtually leak-proof about the goings-on around Dear Leader? Well, somebody inside the bubble is talking now. And since it comes from the GOP’s top propagandist in the Capitol, it must be true:

President Bush was furious with the staff preparation for last week’s inter-American summit in Argentina where his trade proposals ran into unexpected opposition.

The president was reported as particularly unhappy with the work by his National Security Council staff in getting ready for the meeting. That added to Bush’s distress in Buenos Aires, dealing with violent street demonstrators and hostile fellow presidents led by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and including Argentina’s Nestor Kirchner.

The crowning indignity for Bush was the Friday night state dinner starting at 10 p.m., an hour when the president normally is in bed. He left the dinner early, but it was midnight by then.