Well, if you’ve paid any attention today, you know we’re going through the usual drill — same thing we went through with Joe Wilson and Paul O’Neill. He’s disgruntled, he’s only in it to sell books, the timing was political, yadda yadda yadda.

Atrios makes a good catch, which should (but of course won’t) put of these canards to a merciful end:

On the Newshour, Richard Clarke just said that the publication of the book had been delayed for 3 months because the White House delayed clearing it for publication. So, if not for their meddling, it would have been before any reasonable person could have accused him of being “political” for releasing it during the election season.

As August notes, none of the talking points actually disprove anything Clarke said — they’re just attempts to change the subject.

And Oliver Willis asks a good question: just how stupid are the Bushies, anyway?

Why would anyone suspect that Iraq was behind the attack? Iraq has never been in the business of launching attacks against Americans via terrorism, and the single instance of Iraq doing any kind of related plot was an assasination attempt on the former president who beat Hussein in a war! That targeting of an individual is a far cry from a mass casualty terror event.

Bush and his whole crew had and have a lot more information at their fingertips than any average citizen could ever dream of, but did YOU think on 9.11 - this must be Iraq? Even Libya was a more likely source of a terror attack than Iraq.

They’re either incompetent or liars — actually, they’re probably both. And the only reason we’re still having this discussion is due to the fact that a lot of people just can’t bring themselves to admit they were hoodwinked.