Well, that explains it.

Turns out Bush isn't a liar. He's just f***ing nuts.

An intelligence consultant who was present at two White House briefings where the uranium report was discussed confirmed that the President was told the intelligence was questionable and that his national security advisors urged him not to include the claim in his State of the Union address.

"The report had already been discredited," said Terrance J. Wilkinson, a CIA advisor present at two White House briefings. "This point was clearly made when the President was in the room during at least two of the briefings."

Bush's response was anger, Wilkinson said. "He said that if the current operatives working for the CIA couldn't prove the story was true, then the agency had better find some who could," Wilkinson said. "He said he knew the story was true and so would the world after American troops secured the country."

Whoa. Stop the presses. Now, google returns only one hit on this guy's name, and I'm assuming it's a different Terrance Wilkinson that was directing movies for Disabled Peoples International a decade ago in New South Wales. And I've yet to see this confirmed elsewhere, so this could turn out to be complete fiction. If it is not fiction, however, that presents a couple of options (three if you go with the obvious one and just admit he's a habitual liar). First option: Bush is 'round-the-bend delusional and believes he has superhuman powers of cognition. This option also includes the possibility that Bush "knew" they were there because it was one more thing that God told him in their late-night policy sessions. Second option: he's such a walking sucker that he believed Ahmed Chalabi's hot insider tips over the entire US intelligence and foreign service community.

I can't decide which scenario is more frightening. Granted, Chalabi can be convincing. He did, after all, manage to successfully embezzle millions fom the bank he once owned in Jordan, slipping away to London just as the Jordanians caught on. If he ever sets foot in Jordan again, he'll begin serving the 32-year prison sentence they handed down in absentia. And he did manage to get Dick Cheney to restart the federal dollars flowing to his Iraqi National Congress after the State Department discovered that 2 of the 4 million they'd already received had vanished into thin air.

But given that track record, and the wealth of inside info the president has at his fingertips, if Bush hadn't wised up to Chalabi by then, I might just feel safer knowing Dubya was simply insane, because otherwise he's the biggest, easiest mark in world politics today. Either way, if this pans out, then the plausible deniability angle that Ari Fleischer tried and failed miserably to spin yesterday is deader than Strom Thurmond. (link via Daily Kos)