Stop him before he lies again

On four separate occasions during the Miami debate, Bush said that he and Kerry "looked at the same intelligence" before the war in Iraq began.

"The intelligence I looked at was the same intelligence my opponent looked at, the very same intelligence. And when I stood up there and spoke to the Congress, I was speaking off the same intelligence he looked at to make his decisions to support the authorization of force."

It's not a bad argument, but it is a bogus one.

"Kerry did not have access to the same intelligence," former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke, a foreign policy adviser to the Democrat, said on ABC's "This Week" program. Mr. Holbrooke said the president had the advantage of 'unique intelligence,' which he said was significant since the Congress was not made fully aware that all administration experts did not believe the tubes were intended to produce a nuclear weapon.

Spokesman Joe Lockhart made the same point on CBS's "Face the Nation."

"Let me make one correction on what the president said during the debate, and this is something that's widely known in Washington," said Mr. Lockhart. "United States senators don't have access to the same intelligence that the president does."

  The Carpetbagger Report