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Will the press call out the WH's rampant Iraq revisionism?

December 03, 2008 1:42 pm ET by Eric Boehlert

Yesterday Greg Sargent at TPM noted that the press pretty much shrugged its collective shoulders in response to president Bush's declaration that the biggest regret of his presidency was the failure of the intel prior to the Iraq war. 

As Sargent noted:

Not a single one of their reports on the interview that we can find bothered to tell readers that there was plenty of good intel -- ignored by the Bush administration -- saying that Saddam wasn't the threat Bush was claiming he was.

Perhaps urged on by the press' non-response to the heavy-handed revisionism, war cheerleaders Karl Rove and Bill Kristol have now added their voices to the if-we'd-only-known chorus. Writes Sam Stein at HuffPo:

Former Bush strategist Karl Rove said on Tuesday evening that had the President known Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction, the United States would not have gone to war.

As for the NYT columnist:

Bill Kristol...said he agreed with the sentiment that "the President would not in fact have gone to war if he had known what seems to be the case, that Saddam did not have functioning weapons programs at the time."

Again, no signs yet that the press is interested in correcting the record. Whether that has anything to do wtih the fact that the elite press largely signed off with the WH's plans for Iraq in 2003 and that lots of pundits now also subscribe to the misleading if-we'd-only-know talking point, it's hard to say.

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