The Big Mea Culpa

Tim Grieve at Salon.com thinks that Dan Rather may have inadvertantly provided the template for the speech we’ve all been waiting for George W. Bush to give:

I no longer have the confidence in the intelligence that led me to take our country to war. I find I have been misled on the key question of whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. That, combined with the complete lack of evidence that Saddam Hussein had any role in the attacks of Sept. 11, leads me to a point where — if I knew then what I know now — I would not have started a war in Iraq, and I certainly would not have done so if I’d known that more than a thousand U.S. troops and thousands more Iraqi citizens would be killed in the process.

“But I did start the war. I made a mistake in judgment, and for that I am sorry. It was an error that was made, however, in good faith and in the spirit of trying to make America safer.

“Please know that nothing is more important to me than people’s trust in my ability and my commitment to keeping America safe. “

As Grieve points out, all it would take is a very little bit of cutting and pasting on Microsoft Word and Junior could show that he has as much integrity as Dan Rather.