If the Bush administration is bad at one thing (just one?!), it's using logic and reason. President Bush is, at least in my mind, famous for ignoring the finer points of a person's resume and instead focusing on how a person is "a good dad," or "a coach for his son's football team." To Bush, your qualifications lie in what kind of person you are inside, and while this is great for self-esteem, it's terrible in terms of hiring people who can do their jobs well.

And so it is with refuting allegations of wrong-doing. As has been reported today, Ron Suskind's new book, The Way of the World, comes with an allegation that Bush & Co. fabricated a 2001 letter between Saddam Hussein and Hussein's director of intelligence, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti. The letter purports to discuss how Mohammed Atta, one of the nineteen September 11 hijackers, trained for the hijacking mission in Iraq. If true, the letter would confirm the White House's previously long-held belief that there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda, which would then provide a rationale for invading Iraq.

Which the letter did. But, according to Suskind, the letter was fabricated at the White House's request. And no operating relationship has ever been found between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Any piece of evidence that has ever been put forward as evidence of a relationship between the two (and thus, a justification for the war) has been refuted as unreliable at best and an outright lie at worst. This letter, if Suskind is right, falls into the latter category.

The White House, true to form, is not using logic and reason to dispel this accusation; rather, it has resorted to name-calling. White House spokesman Tony Fratto called the accusations "absurd" and said that Suskind practiced "gutter journalism."

This is something that the White House still hasn't learned, for all of the whistleblowers that have come from it: Paul O'Neill, Richard Clarke, Scott McClellan, et al. The White House says, through its spokespeople, that these whistleblowers are bad people and calls their motives into question, but never refutes the merits of the arguments beyond calling them something general, like "absurd."

Here in the world of logic and reason, it doesn't matter if a person has an axe to grind or is a gutter journalist; what matters is whether or not the statements are true. Certainly Harriet Miers could have been the nicest, sweetest lady in the country, but that did not make her qualified to sit on the Supreme Court.

Sorry, White House, you'll have to do better than "absurd" if you want to deal with such an alarming charge.