The Paper of Record

Why is the Washington Post the new ‘paper of record?’ Balance:

In the absence of evidence, there has been an extraordinary amount of attention paid to marginal issues — most recently, those 16 words in President Bush’s State of the Union speech that said, accurately, that British intelligence believed Iraq had been seeking to obtain uranium in Africa. In fact, British intelligence did believe that — and still does, even though one set of documents purporting to show an Iraqi procurement mission in Niger proved to be forgeries. Last week the White House announced that the sentence should not have been included in the speech, because the CIA knew of the Niger forgery and had not been able to confirm the broader British report. The claim was deleted from other administration statements, but some White House officials, banking on the British, apparently pressed for its inclusion in spite of the CIA’s doubts. If so, that would represent one of several instances in which administration statements on Iraq were stretched to reflect the most aggressive interpretation of the intelligence.

The piece is titled “Wait for the Facts.” Fat chance.