Is the Bush lied meme dying?

h/t Instapundit

I ask because today's LA Times carries an opinion piece by James Kirchick of The New Republic entitled "Bush never lied to us about Iraq. The administration simply got bad intelligence. Critics are wrong to assert deception." Given that this piece follows a similar piece in the Washington Post on June 9th I think the answer to my question may be a qualified yes.

Why?

Well I have two interlinking theories about this.

First - I think people are starting to take a serious look at what Obama's foreign policy may look like and they are a little scared. By rehabilitating some of the decisions under President Bush they weaken some of his stances. (And I am not just talking about the political right here either - The New Republic is a left wing rag)

Second - The report that was issued on the 5th by the Senate Intelligence committee was just to raw a partisan political move on something that is very important to a lot of people. Our national security. My personal opinion is that people are looking at this report and thinking to themselves;

1. That the CIA which really screwed the pooch and needs to be held to account is skating scot-free because the Dems have an axe to grind.
2. That it's really not a good idea to be using the official committee reports of the US Senate to engage in this type of thing. Personally I think that it destroys what little trust is left in government.
3. That Rockefeller et. al. are liars. There are just too many newscast going back to even before George Bush was President of Senators pronouncing Saddam Hussein a supporter of terrorists, a WMD prolifirator and a general threat to world peace.

At some point reasonable people have to call BS on this stuff.

from the LA Times:

Four years on from the first Senate Intelligence Committee report, war critics, old and newfangled, still don't get that a lie is an act of deliberate, not unwitting, deception. If Democrats wish to contend they were "misled" into war, they should vent their spleen at the CIA.

In 2003, top Senate Democrats -- not just Rockefeller but also Carl Levin, Clinton, Kerry and others -- sounded just as alarmist. Conveniently, this month's report, titled "Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information," includes only statements by the executive branch. Had it scrutinized public statements of Democrats on the Intelligence, Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees -- who have access to the same intelligence information as the president and his chief advisors -- many senators would be unable to distinguish their own words from what they today characterize as warmongering.

This may sound like ancient history, but it matters. After Sept. 11, President Bush did not want to risk allowing Hussein, who had twice invaded neighboring nations, murdered more than 1 million Iraqis and stood in violation of 16 U.N. Security Council resolutions, to remain in possession of what he believed were stocks of chemical and biological warheads and a nuclear weapons program. By glossing over this history, the Democrats' lies-led-to-war narrative provides false comfort in a world of significant dangers