"I have said Iran is dangerous," Bush said. "The NIE doesn't do anything to change my opinion."

What he's saying here is that Iran being dangerous has absolutely no link to whether or not they have nukes. In other words, Iran's danger is not in the form of a military threat. In fact, I would guess that the danger has nothing to do with Iran at all. The danger Bush is referring to here is to his legacy and the neocon agenda, both of which are in the toilet. He believes the only way they can be redeemed is if he bombs Iran.

There is yet another issue where you will look like a complete fool in discussing. For example:

Cripes, just a day ago Salon writers were ridiculing Stephen Hadley for questioning the 2007 NIE, and now Joan Walsh says the 2005 NIE was the bad one...

It wasn't Joan Walsh who made this declaration. She was referring to the subject matter expert on this one, Flynt Leverett, a top Middle East expert and former senior director on Bush's National Security Council. According to Leverett:

And in 2005, the intelligence community succumbed to that [political pressure to support military action against Iran] -- hook, line and sinker. This time, you had some different people in charge of the process, and some of the pressures from 2005 -- you had Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon then -- were no longer there, although I think there was still some pressure applied.

So, Elephant, do you have some reason to contest this statement by Leverett? Or are you just having a hard time letting go of the idea of another disastrous invasion in the Middle East? It's okay, you can admit it to us.

Great place for panty sniffing, crackpot theories about how Clinton murdered Vince Foster, where Saddam hid all his invisible weapons when he wasn't giving them to OBL, and why the CIA is a liberal fifth column.

In general, it's the safe haven for Republicans who lack the emotional maturity to admit their mistake in supporting Bush and his policies. This is growing to become the US's largest and most vocal self-help group. Unsurprisingly, Opinionjournal is one of the few places where you can read about just how ABSOLUTELY FINE it is for Bush to threaten WW3 against a country with no WMDs. By allowing a place for Republican reprobates to lick their wounds and revel in their fantasies, it may be serving as a release valve.

And for us, it's a great source of comedy. The CIA is really a liberal organization!! Who knew??? I never knew liberalism included deposing the elected leaders of other countries and replacing them with totalitarian dictators who give sweetheart deals to US corporations. Amazing what you can learn!

Of the two major parties, only the Democrats would countenance a non-mainstream Christian to lead them. With the GOP, he has to pass the litmus test of the American Taliban. Just as a majority of Iraqis will not agree to being led by a Sunni, a majority of Republicans will not be led by a Mormon. Also, should he switch, he could go back to his old views on abortion and other social issues.

Of course, Dems might never forgive him the fact that he made his dog shit himself while riding on the roof.

Virtue, your point seems to be that because the NIE on Iraq was wrong, therefore all NIEs must be presumed wrong. I'm betting that in your case, this only applies to NIEs that that you find disappointing, such as the very unwelcome news that you MAY NOT get to put a yellow ribbon on your car for the troops fighting in Iran.

This is lazy thinking at best. First, you refer to "the NIE" as if it were some single source of information that lacks credibility. Fact is, it's the agreed-upon consensus of 16 intelligence gathering streams. As such, it reflects the conventional wisdom of our intelligence community at large. And the confidence level is high. So, if you're going to discard these conclusions, while clinging to other conclusions come to by the same intelligence community, you're on a rather thin branch in terms of your argument.

Rather, understanding that the NIE is a produce of the intel community at large, it would be more effective to look at why the Iraq NIE and the 2005 Iran NIE were wrong. As has been documented ad nauseum, Bush Admin partisans (Cheney, Wolfawitz, Rumsfeld and other PNAC conspirators) actively worked on this intel and cooked the books. And they were wrong. The intel community, manned by hoards of career professionals, took a massive hit to their credibility. Suffering from that backlash, they produced the current NIE in which such undue Bush Admin influence was minimized. Hence, it's easy to understand how the current NIE could be a lot more credible than the past ones.

This is easy to understand. However, because you value War Against Country X more than you value national security and sane foreign policy (at least when such war is necessary to help redeem Republican mistakes), you instead come up with this absurd conclusion:

Unfortunately, what the Democrats are doing with what’s being speculated in the new NIE report is using it to accuse Bush of exaggerating the threat and/or being an outright liar -- all the usual demagoguery at the expense of national security.

Right. I mean, it's not like this has ever happened before, has it? It's not like Bush has any sort of history of exaggerating threats and outright lying, right? I mean, if that were the case, every real American would be correct in casting him under the light of extreme skepticism. But since it turned out that, sure enough, Saddam had a massive arsenal of WMDs just like Bush and the others said, then I suppose this kind of scrutiny is terribly unfair.