When asked if Harriet miers was the best qualified candidate for the Supreme Court bush said:

"Yes," he answered. "Otherwise I wouldn't have put her on."

There is no stretch of imagination that a petty bureaucrat with no legal training would be the best qualified candidate for the SCOTUS.

The best thing about this example is even hard core right wingers have difficulty arguing against it.

who lives in a reality where a lie is defined as: a : an assertion of something known or believed by the speaker to be untrue with intent to deceive b : an untrue or inaccurate statement that may or may not be believed true by the speaker

Explaining to them that (a) constitutes the controlling definition of the term "lie" in these circumstances, whereas (b) does not. The manner in which the liberals are using the phrase "Bush Lied" is clearly intended to imply "intent to deceive", but we have no way of determining that Bush knew or believed what he was saying was untrue.

I understand that you probably pulled these from some dictionary definition someplace, however I would further argue that in common usage of the term "lie" that (b) is not even a valid definition. By this definition, any statement which is not 100% true and accurate constitutes a "lie".

Example:
Random Person: How do I get to 101 main street from here?
Me: Head north two blocks and turn right.

Now, if I gave my answer in all good faith and truthfully to the best of my knowledge yet it turns out they needed to turn left instead of right, have I "lied"? I say no.

If you prefer to say "yes" in this circumstance then you are removing from the equation my intent, for it matters not whether I intended to deceive.

I may have been confused as to which block we were on or I may simply have misspoke (i.e. I meant to say left but for whatever reason the word that came out of my mouth was right) or I may simply have been incorrect in my understanding of where 101 main street actually was. I don't believe that in common usage very many people would claim that I had "lied" under these scenarios.

If you accept (b) as being a valid definition of "lie" then it is a true statement that everyone posting on this site is also a "two face liar" because at some point in their lives they will have made and incorrect or inaccurate statement.

Do you all accept that you are a bunch of "two face liars" because of this? If you do then I guess that you are basically the same as President Bush in this respect.

Neither of the first two is even a contender for being a lie because they are true.

The last is at least a contender, but unless Bush knew that what he was saying was untrue (we have no idea how the info about the so called labs was presented to him by his direct reports at the time). I choose to take him at his word that he genuinely thought that we had captured the biological labs but was merely mistaken about what they actually were.

You are free to disagree, and you obviously do, but your assertion of lying is just that, an assertion based on your opinion. I am merely voicing my own opinion to the contrary.

you state things clearly with so few words.

about 99% of the stuff that appears under a blue line on this (and any left wing) site as well.

I am simply not going to let the bombastic cries of the left go unanswered any longer. As long as you are here spouting left wing propaganda I will here countering it on a post for post basis.

But you sure do make me waste time digging up all of the counterpoints. I reviewed, briefly, your references cited above. These are all old news that has been debunked for years.

In response I provide a Washinton Post piece which provides the following key points:

Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, dispatched by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq sought to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program with uranium from Africa, was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly.

In other words, he lied.

The subsequent Senate Hearings chaired by the Democrats (where Valerie herself testified) as well as the following excerpt from your own source provides ample proof of his wife's involvment sending him to Niger:

Notes - Niger/Iraq uranium Meeting CIA, 2/19/02

Meeting apparently convened by Valerie Wilson, a CIA WMD managerial type and the wife of Amb. Joe Wilson, with the idea that the agency and the larger USG could dispatch Joe to Niger to use his contacts there to sort out the Niger/Iraq uranium sale question.

But if that was not enough here is the relevant except from the Washington Post article cited above:

The report states that a CIA official told the Senate committee that Plame "offered up" Wilson's name for the Niger trip, then on Feb. 12, 2002, sent a memo to a deputy chief in the CIA's Directorate of Operations saying her husband "has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." The next day, the operations official cabled an overseas officer seeking concurrence with the idea of sending Wilson, the report said.

Wilson has asserted that his wife was not involved in the decision to send him to Niger.

"Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," Wilson wrote in a memoir published this year. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip."

Poor Joe isn't looking so credible anymore. That's all fine and good, you say, but it doesn't change what Wilson found out, right? Well, here's another excerpt:

Wilson's assertions -- both about what he found in Niger and what the Bush administration did with the information -- were undermined yesterday in a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report.

The panel found that Wilson's report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson's assertions and even the government's previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address.

...

The report also said Wilson provided misleading information to The Washington Post last June. He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly been forged because "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong."

"Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong' when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports," the Senate panel said. Wilson told the panel he may have been confused and may have "misspoken" to reporters. The documents -- purported sales agreements between Niger and Iraq -- were not in U.S. hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip to Niger.

...

Wilson said that a former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, was unaware of any sales contract with Iraq, but said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him, insisting that he meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between Niger and Iraq -- which Mayaki interpreted to mean they wanted to discuss yellowcake sales. A report CIA officials drafted after debriefing Wilson said that "although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to UN sanctions on Iraq."

According to the former Niger mining minister, Wilson told his CIA contacts, Iraq tried to buy 400 tons of uranium in 1998.

Just so it is blazingly obvious to all, let me just highlight that all of the above amounts to strong evidence that Joe Wilson is simply a liar. And not the kind where we can quibble about the meaning of the word, liar, but a full on caught in the act type of liar. He claimed to come to conclusions based on information and data that he could not possibly have had, because the CIA didn't even have it for eight months after his so called trip.

Now, with regards to the INR memo it proves nothing. Zip, zero, nada. This is for the following reasons:

1) We have no proof that this memo was ever made available to Bush. Even the Truth Out article on the topic admits: "The memo does not say that the State Department alerted the White House on January 12, 2003, about the bogus uranium claims." (Carl Ford's conjectures in interviews not withstanding.)

2) This only indicates that INR had concerns over the Niger intel, but others in the intelligence community and most specifically the British continued to stand by it.

3) When confronted with conflicting intel and/or opinions from trusted sources, it is ultimately the President's judgement on which to believe and which not to believe on matters of national security. That is what he was elected to do.

So even if one organization considers something "dubious" but others still maintain that it is credible, it is up to the President to make the ultimate judgement call. So soon after 9/11 it is completely understandable and reasonable for the President to come down on the side of believing the worst to protect the American people.

Doing so in good faith does not constitute lying.

Thus far we have addressed only the Niger issue. Your National Journal reference focuses, however, on a separate but equally important issue. That of the aluminum tubes. From your own article we have:

... Rove expressed his concerns shortly after an informal review of classified government records by then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley determined that Bush had been specifically advised that claims he later made in his 2003 State of the Union address -- that Iraq was procuring high-strength aluminum tubes to build a nuclear weapon -- might not be true, according to government records and interviews.

Hadley was particularly concerned that the public might learn of a classified one-page summary of a National Intelligence Estimate, specifically written for Bush in October 2002. The summary said that although "most agencies judge" that the aluminum tubes were "related to a uranium enrichment effort," the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy Department's intelligence branch "believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons."

In other words, MOST agencies were of the opinion that the tubes were related to uranium enrichment, while SOME agencies did not agree. This is hardly proof that he was presented with a definitive statement that the tubes were NOT uranium enrichment related. Quite the contrary under the circumstances.

Even so, the point is totally moot from the perspective of whether he lied or not. Here is his quote direct from your source:

Three months after receiving that assessment, the president stated without qualification in his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."

Let me highlight the most significant part: "Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."

There is no disagreement on whether the tubes were being purchased or not, they were. So that part of the statement is undeniable true.

There is also no disagreement on whether the tubes could have been used to enrich uranium, they clearly could. So the claim that Iraq was attempting to purchase aluminum tubes "suitable for nuclear weapons production" is clearly true as well.

Given this I claim that (this part of) his statement was 100% true and thereby could not possibly be a lie.

The fact that the various agencies were in disagreement as to Iraq's actual intended use is not even pertinent to the determination of whether the statement made is true or not. But even if it WAS pertinent, the mere fact that "most agencies" thought that they were intended for uranium enrichment sort of trumps any INR qualms. So again, he was not lying.