RNC Chair Ken Mehlman gave a great example of the current White House spin. The thing is he made it so clear that he gave away the code. What they have done is simply changed the question to the one they want to answer. All we have to do is listen to what he actually said compared to what we think he said.
Here's today's transcript.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9967566/
The translation comes after the break.
For days the Right has been saying that the Democrats who voted for the war saw exactly the same information that President Bush saw. That may well be literally true, but it doesn't mean what they want us to think it means.
What Mehlman and the rest of the talking heads said was very specific.
"the majority of the Democrats in the Senate, 80 Democrats in the House, looked at the exact same evidence the president looked at"
"What I'm suggesting is for people to say that they looked at the exact same evidence he looked at"
"The president got briefed every single day. The members of Congress had access to information. The information was basically the same"
They referred to the information President Bush saw, not Cheney, not the White House Iraq Group, just what President Bush saw himself. Thing is, the President is famous for not reading anything. The data he actually saw himself is probably almost nothing, and probably was limited to what he wanted to hear. He probably had lots of white space on the page for crayons.
So, it's entirely likely that all the qualifications and doubts about Iraq were not written down on the one page executive summary that Bush might have seen. That doesn't mean that Bush was misled. It just means Bush is lazy. Bush wasn't asking anybody what the facts were. Bush was just looking for ammunition to justify what he had already decided he wanted to do. The rest of the crew cooked the books not to fool the President, but because that was their job.
Here's the test. If Bush thought he had been misled by his staff into starting a war then he would have fired the people who misled him. Since they are all still there (except the people who have been promoted) we know than nobody in the White House did anything the President didn't want them to do.