If I read this in the press often enough, I may actually come to believe it. Thank you Barbara Ehrenreich and Maureen Dowd, respectively, for providing us with the kind of thoughtful, investigative analysis that helps clarify the issues.

"One thousand coalition soldiers have died because the C.I.A. was so eager to go along with the emperor's delusion that he was actually wearing clothes."

"...the White House keeps passing the blame to the same C.I.A. that Dick Cheney and his Pentagon henchmen leaned on to supply the rationale they needed for the war they were determined to launch."

I'm not going to bother linking to what must be hundreds, or thousands, of articles which state the facts that Ms. Ehrenreich and Ms. Dowd ignore so that they can appear witty:

- President Bush believed the same thing that Bill Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards, Tony Blair and a lot of others had been saying for years about Iraq's WMDs.

- Both recent U.S. Senate and British parliamentary reports clearly state that no coercion was used in preparing intelligence estimates for their respective heads of government.

It seems that of late, the NY Times Op-Ed page is best known for mocking the President (see also Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd) and not for any kind of serious anaylsis of the issues.

I guess they save their serious analyses for the front page now:

Hear the Rumor on Cheney? Capital Buzzes, Denials Aside