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President Bush noted that the memo first surfaced during Blair's recent reelection campaign and added that the idea of his team having their minds made up about using military force against Saddam couldn't be "farther from the truth."

"My conversation with the Prime Minister was, how could we do this peacefully," Bush told reporters. "Nobody wants to commit military into combat. It's the last option. The consequences of committing the military are -- are very difficult. The hardest things I do as the president is to try to comfort families who've lost a loved one in combat. It's the last option that the President must have -- and it's the last option I know my friend had, as well."

In July 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that the Bush Administration did not influence the intelligence findings. In particular, the committee noted that it "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities." The independent Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction concluded in its report that the Intelligence Community "did not make or change any analytic judgments in response to political pressure to reach a particular conclusion."

When looking at the left wing blog sites, it's as if the above findings, resulting from months of interviews, investigations, and evidence collection, didn't exist. One web site dedicated to the "Downing Street" memo, describes the memo's contents as "shocking." The web site goes on to say that documents such as the memo make it "at least possible" that a crime "may have been" committed by the Bush administration. It's "at least possible" that a crime "may have been" committed? What kind of statement is that? It's also "at least possible" that there "may be" aliens hidden in New Mexico. No, I don't have evidence to support that claim, but there is "talk" by "some" that the aliens exist. Hmmm... must be a fact, right?

DowningStreetMemo.com adds that the memo "summarizes all of the key components of Bush's deception" and "may not tell us anything we didn't already know, but it does offer hard evidence that the Bush administration misled the country into war." Hard evidence? Clearly these folks are not reading the same memo as I am.

Left field comments are not just reserved for web sites. Democratic Rep. Charlie Rangel recently compared President Bush's "fraud" regarding Iraq to the Holocaust of World War II. "It's the biggest fraud ever committed on the people of this country," Rangel told WWRL Radio's Steve Malzberg and Karen Hunter, according to NewsMax.com. "This is just as bad as six million Jews being killed. The whole world knew it and they were quiet about it, because it wasn't their ox that was being gored."

Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy added that the memo confirms President Bush "distorted and misrepresented the intelligence in its attempt to link Saddam Hussein with the terrorists of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden, and with weapons of mass destruction that Iraq did not have." Leave it to Kennedy and Rangel to not let the facts get in the way of politics and posturing.

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