We love analyzing lies because the lies tell us so much. If you lie, we assume you did it maliciously. Nobody mistakenly lies; they do it on purpose. And that's worse than any mistake.

The issues that arise when a President lies make the inquiry more complicated than it should be. This started with Watergate. For those of you who cut class in high school social students (or are too young to remember), Watergate was about President Nixon's cover-up a political crime in which his flunkies broke into the Democratic Party's headquarters (at the Watergate hotel) and snooped around for secret information. The focus was Nixon's malicious failure to tell the truth. When Congress investigated Watergate, the famous question was "What did the President know, and when did he know it?" This places the focus on a smoking gun, which rarely exists.

That question may have been useful for solving the Watergate scandal, but it's failed us ever since. Watergate was about Nixon and his dark refusal to play by the rules. Other political scandals, like Iran-contra in the 1980's and the manipulation of Iraq war intelligence, also focused on the President's lies, but that missed the point, which is why President Reagan (Iran-contra) and President Bush (Iraq WMD's) got away with murder, perhaps literally. When the scandals involve failures of a presidential administration as opposed to a President's self-destructive antics (like Nixon during Watergate or Bill Clinton during the Monica sex scandal) then we should presume the President is personally responsible for the crimes of his administration. By asking what the President knew and when he knew it, we allow the Presidents to blame their minions and to play dumb in the face of rampant lawlessness.

As we we slog through the fifth year of the Iraq war, we should think about this. Investigative journalists have been trying to show that George W. Bush personally threw caution to the wind in waging war, and there's some good evidence in support of that thesis. But there's compelling evidence that the administration is corrupt and manipulated the pre-war intelligence. Bush did not reign in anyone with respect to these shenanigans, and in my view that makes him as guilty as the minions who shredded the evidence in opposition to the war.

The latest news about the manipulation of pre-war intellegence comes from the Washington Post, which reports in the course of a book review that "shortly before accepting the job of director of national intelligence, Michael McConnell seemed to side with those who believe that the administration manipulated intelligence on Iraq for political purposes before the 2003 invasion."

On Meet the Press this weekend, McConnell elaborated: "“My sense of it is their political faith and convictions influenced how they took information and interpreted [it], how they picked up and interpreted outside events. … I’ve read much more about the current set of players and they did set up a whole new interpretation because they didn’t like the answers. They’ve gotten results that in my view now have been disastrous,” [McConnell said].

Bush will get away with this because no one this time said it was Bush who manipulated the intelligence. Any smoking gun on the war has long since been thrown away or eaten. The question that no one is asking is did George W. Bush reprimand anyone or take steps to repudiate the guys and gals who manipulated the intelligence. It's doubtful that he did. That makes Bush as guilty as the manipulators. He is on the hook for the corruption of his administration. And that is the way we should view scandals.