Red Fish, Blue Fish. Yellow Cake, Green Cake.

Halfway through this Washington Post article, the authors catalog the smörgåsbord of explanations offered by the Bush administration on why the claim that Iraq tried to buy a box of Instant Yellowcake from Niger was included in the State of the Union address. It's quite funny. The situation reminds me of the story where four teenagers come home past their curfew, make up a tale that their car had a flat, but forget to agree which tire was flat before being interrogated individually by their parents.

One reason this is a serious problem for the Bush administration is that many people voted for him because they thought he had more integrity that the Clinton/Gore administration. Both possibilities behind why the uranium claim was included in the State of the Union address--that the Bush administration willfully lied or they lied to themselves by ignoring the evidence--poses a serious threat to the image of Bush's integrity.

My guess is that they knew the evidence was shaky, but wanted to put it in so badly that they justified including it because the CIA and other sources said "this is probably wrong" rather than "this is absolutely wrong". I think they also assumed that people would forget the claim after they found biological and chemical weapons in Iraq. Who's going to care about one claim when the boxes of Acme Anthrax show up, right?

On a side note, there was a lot of evidence that Hussein had some biological and chemical weapon capabilities. So where are the weapons? Pick your possibility: Hussein didn't have any weapons (unlikely), he destroyed them shortly before being invaded, they're in Iraq but we haven't found them yet, or they're now in the hands of 50 terrorist groups.