Who is the bigger dupe: Dan Rather or George W. Bush?

Bush apologists are now demanding a retraction and an apology from CBS News and Dan Rather over the apparently forged National Guard documents. CBS was apparently duped into running a story on 60 Minutes II that was based on the bogus memos.

Well, get in line folks. I’m still waiting on a retraction and an apology from the Bush administration for taking us to war based on phony information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The chief U.S. weapons inspector has now formally concluded that Iraq Had No WMDs.

So which of these two instances of people being duped by bogus information is more deserving of our attention? If Dan Rather is forced to step down to atone for the mistakes at CBS, why isn’t Bush stepping down for misleading us into a war that didn’t need to happen when it did?

While the Bush-appointed head of the Iraq Survey Group, Charles Duelfer, is finally admitting that Saddam Hussein did not have stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction - the major reason for our headlong rush to war more than a year ago - he still insists that Hussein “left signs that he had idle programs he someday hoped to revive.”

Uh huh, sure. And Saddam also had big plans of becoming a best-selling novelist.

“Saddam Hussein spent the final weeks before the war writing a novel predicting that he would lead an underground resistance movement to victory over the Americans, rather than planning the defence of his regime...”

Maybe during the first Gulf War Saddam might have been a threat, but it is clear now that at the start of this war he was just a delusional old man who was rapidly losing control of his country.

"He lost touch with reality," said Saad Hadi, a journalist who was involved in the production of Saddam's novels. "He thought he was a god who could do anything, including writing novels."

So Bush was duped into taking us into an ill advised war against a toothless old dictator who had “lost touch with reality” at the cost of more than 1,000 U.S. lives and more than $200 billion in tax dollars. And right-wingers are demanding that Dan Rather step down to salvage CBS’s credibility. What about our nation’s credibility?