Bush Did Not Take Responsibility

Responsibility, first of all, is an odd word. I'm going to ignore its meaning in this post and focus on the absurdity of this analysis provided to us by that bastion of the SCLM CNN.

"It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong," Bush said during his fourth and final speech before Thursday's vote for Iraq's parliament. "As president I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq. And I'm also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities. And we're doing just that."

"My decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision," the president said. "Saddam was a threat and the American people, and the world is better off because he is no longer in power."

Actually, this article has little content beyond Bush's own words and direct quotes from some detractors. But the headline "Bush Takes Responsibility for Invasion Intelligence" and the lead "On the eve of Iraq's historic election, President Bush took responsibility Wednesday for 'wrong' intelligence that led to the war, but he said removing Saddam Hussein was still necessary" comprise very disturbing coverage of the speech. Nothing in this article indicates that Mr. Bush is "taking responsibility" for anything. Did he ever claim that it wasn't his decision to go to war? Of course not. He had at a time maintained that the intelligence was correct, but hasn't used that one for a long time. Furthermore, he continues to maintain that the decision to go to war was the right one. So really this is nothing new. He maintains that he based his decision to go to war on faulty intelligence that everybody shared, that's not taking responsibility and its nothing new. I don't expect Bush to take responsibility, he's not going to ever say that his Administration "fixed the intelligence arround the policy" as the Downing Street Memos put it. Its not plausible to expect him to do that, for to do that would be to essentially admit that he lied, which would deal the final blow to his Presidency making him a total lame duck. Come on CNN, let's not give the man credit for "taking responsibility" when he quite clearly didn't.