With the administration running damage control in the wake of Bush's and Cheney's insane comments ("It's perfectly all right to question why we want to war, as long as you don't question why we went to war"), Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was sent out to take bullets on no fewer than four Sunday news shows: FOX News Sunday, Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, This Week, and Face the Nation.

What's most fascinating are the comments Rumsfeld made on CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer. Blitzer tells Rumsfeld that the administration's push for war was made based on faulty intelligence. He cites an instance in which the administration claimed that there was a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, only to have its source for that information discredited later. Rumsfeld's response:

There is no question that there are fabricators that operate in the intelligence world. And there's also no question you can find intelligence reports on every side of every issue.

When you look at the reams of intelligence information that the United States develops from different agencies, they gather from other friendly foreign liaison services, you can find in any given week intelligence that conflicts with each other. The implication that there's something amazing about that is just ridiculous.

Finally! An administration official that actually answers a question instead of bringing up September 11, al-Qaeda, or "Saddam Hussein was a very bad man."

Rumsfeld's response to this question is, "There will always be bad intelligence." Fair enough. And it's the job of intelligence experts at the CIA to separate the "good" intelligence -- substantiated information based on credible sources -- from the "bad" intelligence -- unsubstantiated information that comes from uncredible sources (like the implication that Mohammed Atta met in Prague with Iraq officials -- that one comes from a source known to be uncredible).

And then, in a moment that I will remember forever, Rumsfeld said this:

It's clear the intelligence was wrong.

Whaaa? Whoosa-- ? Whaaa? Is this a Bush administration official telling the truth? Start the presses! Alert the newsmedia! Get Hearst on the phone! Prepare the teletype!

Yes, Rumsfeld admitted that the intelligence was wrong. So, what do we have here? On Veterans Day, Bush said that it was irresponsible to suggest that the administration manipulated intelligence, and besides, he said, Democrats got the same intelligence and they still voted for war. Bringing together Rumsfeld's statement that the intelligence was wrong, we can come to the following conclusions:

1. The Bush administration knew the intelligence was wrong and disseminated it, anyway, in which case, Bush is lying and the administration did manipulate intelligence; or,
2. The Bush administration didn't know that the intelligence was wrong.

In the first case, the administration is malicious; in the second, the administration is incompetent. If we take Bush at his word -- I know, you'll have to suspend disbelief for a second -- then the administration's overarching reason for going to war was, "We were too dumb to be able to discern the bad intelligence from the good intelligence." They're pleading stupidity as a reason for sending 2,000 people to die! "Oops, our bad" is the administration's position on the war. "But, hey, we're there already and we can't leave now."

It's a sorry sign when the administration has to resort to pleading stupidity in order to save its own ass.

(By the way, there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that case number one -- the administration disseminated intelligence as fact even though it knew that said intelligence was false -- is actually what happened. Take, for example, Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger and his conclusion that documents showing that the Iraqis bought yellowcake uranium were obvious forgeries, a conclusion every other intelligence agency in the world came to. Bush is also lying when he says that every other intelligence agency in the world believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was willing to use them.)