The factcheck,org article on Bush's "16 words" really pisses me off...

on how it seeks to absolve Bush of his lie.

factcheck.org lends lots of credence to what the Senate Committee said on the matter, as if that committee was not composed of a majority of Republicans, and to what Lord Butler declared in a whitewash of British intelligence, as if Tony Blair hadn't commissioned him to do just that.

factcheck.org totally leaves out the fact that the same claim was removed from a Cincinnati speech just 3 months earlier because of its dubiousness.

George Tenet: "These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the President."

Isn't that the crux of the matter? But here is what factcheck quotes:

Senate Report: When coordinating the State of the Union, no Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analysts or officials told the National Security Council (NSC) to remove the "16 words" or that there were concerns about the credibility of the Iraq-Niger uranium reporting.

Is that so? I doubt that either had final review of the speech.

http://www.factcheck.org/article222.html

they seemed to try to absolve Bush or make his lies less significant, while at the same time really tearing into anything that could be remotely construed as mis-representation by Kerry.

It almost seemed like they were falling victim to the same thing that affects the news networks - fear of being branded as having "liberal bias", they try to pre-emptively overcompensate by being extra hard on liberals and giving a soft pass to conservatives.