On Tuesday, President Bush said he was never forewarned by the intelligence community that Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003:

In August, I think it was John — Mike McConnell came in and said, We have some new information. He didn’t tell me what the information was.

Now the White House is revealing that wasn’t true. In fact, Bush did know what the information was. CNN reports:

President Bush was told in August that Iran’s nuclear weapons program ‘may be suspended,’ the White House said Wednesday, which seemingly contradicts the account of the meeting given by Bush Tuesday.”

The White House statement released by Dana Perino tonight also states McConnell told Bush “the new information might cause the intelligence community to change its assessment of Iran’s covert nuclear program.”

On Tuesday, Bush said “nobody ever told me” to back down from his hawkish rhetoric on Iran. No, maybe not. But Bush knew Iran “may have suspended” its nuclear weapons program and that the intelligence community was in the process of “changing its assessment.” And yet, he continued to warn of “World War III” and a “nuclear holocaust” because nobody told him specifically to stop.

UPDATE: Dan Froomkin reported today that Bush deceptively “changed the way he talked about Iran” starting in August. “Instead of directly condemning Iranian leaders for pursuing nuclear weapons, he started more vaguely accusing them of seeking the knowledge necessary to make such a weapon. Even as he did that, however, he and the vice president accelerated their rhetorical efforts to persuade the public that the nuclear threat posed by Iran was grave and urgent.”

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Writing at the Corner today, Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson — who was recently given a National Humanities Medal by President Bush — tried to claim that he has long cautioned against bombing Iran. Unfortunately for Hanson, he was saying something quite different in August:

“I have written too much about why it is a bad idea to bomb Iran now.” — Victor Davis Hanson, 12/5/2007

VERSUS

“We really need to start doing some things beyond talking, and if that is going into Iranian airspace, or buzzing Iranians, or even starting to forget where the border is and taking out some of these training camps.” — Victor Davis Hanson, 8/13/2007

The AP reports that for the “first time, more than 200 of the world’s leading climate scientists, losing their patience, urged government leaders to take radical action to slow global warming because ‘there is no time to lose.’” Last week, more than 150 global business leaders also released a petition demanding a 50 percent cut in greenhouse gases.

AP reports:

Democrats turned back repeated efforts by Republican senators to soften the economic impact of a global warming bill before advancing it out of a Senate committee on Wednesday.

It was the first bill calling for mandatory U.S. limits on so-called greenhouse gases to be taken up in Congress since global warming emerged as an environmental issue more than two decades ago. The bill was approved 11-8 by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. [...]

The bill calls for the United States to cut carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions by 70 percent by 2050 from electric power plants, manufacturing and transportation.

It would create a “cap-and-trade” system whereby companies would have pollution allowances that they could sell if they went below the emission limits, or buy if they found they could not meet the requirements.

Today in a new interview with Politico, Vice President Cheney said that he is “confident” Iraq will eventually be in a “good” enough place that the administration will be able to look back and say, “That was the right decision. It was a sound decision going into Iraq.” When will that time be? According to Cheney, Jan. 2009:

But Cheney said that by the middle of January 2009, it will be clear that “we have in fact achieved our objective in terms of having a self-governing Iraq that’s capable for the most part of defending themselves, a democracy in the heart of the Middle East, a nation that will be a positive force in influencing the world around it in the future.”

All of that by 2009? “Yes, sir,” he replied.

The Bush administration has been pledging this flourishing democracy since the United States invaded almost five years ago. Some of Cheney’s promises:

We would act in that same spirit after a regime change in Iraq. With our help, a liberated Iraq can be a great nation once again. Iraq is rich in natural resources and human talent, and has unlimited potential for a peaceful and a prosperous future. Our goal would be an Iraq that has territorial integrity, a government that is democratic and pluralistic, a nation where the human rights of every ethnic and religious group are recognized and respected. [8/26/02]

RUSSERT: And you are convinced the Kurds, the Sunnis, the Shiites will come together in a democracy? [...]
CHENEY: I think the prospects of being able to achieve this kind of success, if you will, from a political standpoint, are probably better than they would be for virtually any other country and under similar circumstances in that part of the world. [3/16/03]

We will succeed in Iraq, just like we did in Afghanistan. We will stand up a new government under an Iraqi-drafted constitution. We will defeat that insurgency, and, in fact, it will be an enormous success story. [6/24/05]

The progress we’ve seen in Iraq has been superb, and we can be confident going forward because the Iraqi people value their own liberty and are determined to choose their own destiny. … The victory of freedom in Iraq will inspire democratic reformers in other lands. [10/3/05]

According to the nonpartisan Freedom House, Iraq is still considered “not free,” with its “civil liberties rating” actually declining from the previous year. Privately, the White House is scaling back its “expectation of quickly achieving major steps toward unifying the country.” Gen. David Petraeus and Iraq Amb. Ryan Crocker have also stated that they foresee “a significant American role” in Iraq through 2009.

Of course, there’s reason to doubt Cheney’s prediction. This is the man who said we were in the “last throes” of “the insurgency” on June 20, 2005.

In an interview with the Texas Monthly, former Bush counselor Dan Bartlett said the White House press corps is too “critical” of Bush:

I think White House correspondents have been tagged, unfairly, with not being tough enough on the administration and President Bush in the run-up to the war. If you go back and look, they asked all the right questions. The problem is, they’re acting now like they have to be five times more critical, and I think they’ve gone overboard.

Like Karl Rove, Bartlett also claimed that “Iraq is not going to be the front-burner issue in the way that everybody initially predicted.”

UPDATE: TPM and Kevin Drum note that Bartlett also said the White House enjoyed communicating with right-wing bloggers because “they regurgitate exactly and put up on their blogs what you said to them.”

Marc Ambinder asks some good questions about Mormonism and politics, including number two “Are those who object to Mormonism on theological and doctrinal grounds religious bigots?” I think the answer there needs to be a clear “no.” Obviously, people are going to disagree about theological matters and there’s nothing wrong with that. The question of bigotry concerns the possibility of irrational prejudice against people who subscribe to the tenets of Mormonism. Clearly, an aversion to the idea of a Mormon president exists out there. Some of this, perhaps, is bigotry. But some isn’t. For example, Marc asks “Is Mormonism objectively similar to widely accepted variants of evangelical Christian theology?”

In other words: Is Mormonism a kind of Christianity? In some ways, it’s not really my place to judge. But obviously a lot of Christians think it isn’t. And I think they have a plausible case. (Not just Evangelicals, either, the Catholic Church says Mormon baptisms are invalid). Nothing wrong with not being a Christian, but the fly in the ointment is that Mormons say they are Christians. To me, this isn’t a big deal. But that’s because, not being a Christian, I don’t really care about the integrity of Christianity.

But I’ll say this: Like most Jewish Americans, I’m perfectly reconciled to the fact that there are all these Christians running around and I think I harbor no prejudice against them. But I really don’t care for “Jews for Jesus.” The problem isn’t that Jews for Jesus aren’t real Jews; the problem is that they aren’t real Jews but insist on saying they are. Now if faced with the choice between a Democratic Jew for Jesus promising universal health care (yes! even via a mandate), fully auctioned carbon permits, an end to the war in Iraq, a grand bargain with Iran, etc. and a conservative Republican or Joe Lieberman or what have you, sure, I’d cast a ballot for someone who’s religious views bug me. But given the choice between a Jew for Jesus and a plausible alternative candidate, I think I’d go for the plausible alternative. Insofar as there are orthodox Christians out there thinking they’d rather not vote for a Mormon along similar lines, I can certainly sympathize with that, especially since the best case one can make for Romney on the merits is that maybe he doesn’t believe any of the things he’s saying.