People were actually asking Condoleeza Rice this morning if the president was going to admit he was wrong about the weapons of mass destruction situation he claimed existed in Iraq. It was weird. I love watching Condi in these situations, because even though there's all this other information around to make people think skeptically about what she's saying, she still keeps spinning her line. Today it was "this is a hard problem. You're talking about VERY SECRETIVE REGIMES that WANT TO DECEIVE". I lost count of the number of times she said that. But the funny thing was that even the soft news practitioners were going like "uh-huh, right, right, okay" whenever she would respond like that to their questions about claim-fact discrepancies, and it sounded to me like they were thinking, "whatever, lady". The thing is, people actually WANT TO KNOW what happened. It appears that Kay [the no WOMD guy] is directing people's focus to intelligence failures rather than the president, and maybe that's true. I dunno. But people have big trust issues now. They are concerned about how a pre-emption doctrine is supposed to work without sound intelligence, which goes hand in hand with the whole "what the hell did we invade a country for?" thing. Like, lady, we killed people. There was international law flouting and stuff. We stopped eating cheese. You said it needed to be done. So I doubt that Condi put people at ease this morning with her 'the baddies are really really bad and don't help us at all' position. But I never read these things right. I think her stuff won't fly, so it probably will. Just like I thought Wesley Clark, on Meet the Press on Sunday, intelligently and honestly addressed people's 'concerns' about his pro-choice position and his opinion about Michael Moore's opinion about George being a deserter, but then five minutes later Tom Brokaw told me he hadn't, and we were watching the same interview. I never get this stuff right, see. Anyway, I found a funny quote the other day. It was from Rush Limbaugh, probably last year after they had invaded, and it went something to the effect of "If there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I will publicly call the president a liar and I'll never believe another word that comes out of his mouth". This makes me giggle. I imagine that Rush hasn't done that yet. He's probably 'waiting for all the evidence to come in', which seems like a really reasonable thing to do. Anything else would just be plain rash.