You wrote:

What I have a problem with though... is that if this really was an intentional lie to the american people, then why? If the president knew it was false, then what was his plan for when no weapons of mass destruction are found?

The basic idea here is one of plausible deniability. By advancing plausible justifications for promoting the threat of Iraqi possession of WMD, the Bush administration is able to deny lying about it.

For Bush apologists, it matters not that the justifications were not credible (read: plausible) to those who bothered to peer even just a little beyond the lurid headlines of the mainstream media.

Most damming to the Bush adminstration's plausible deniability of the Iraqi WMD threat are the public statements of his own experts which strongly refuted the credibility of the main elements of the administration's argument.

That is to say, the Niger yellowcake and aluminum-tubes claims were not accepted by experts in these matters, and their findings were known to the Bush administration from mid-2002, or earlier - well in advance of President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, when he again repeated the Niger yellowcake and aluminum tubes stories (among others) as proof of the threat posed by an Iraq bristling with WMD.

You argue that none dare call it a lie. I beg to differ.

You also wrote;

He's just sitting there looking stupid? Was that part of his premeditated plan? to sit there and look stupid....

I direct your attention back to September 11, 2001 - Booker school.

Whether or not Bush just sat there looking stupid depends, I suppose, on your definition of stupid, but there can be no doubt about Bush just sitting there after being informed by his chief-of-staff that our nation was being attacked.

Recall too that Pres. Bush subsequently claimed that he saw the first WTC attack on television while at Booker.

Forgive me for anticipating your rebuttal:

Since eveybody later found out that there was no live TV coverage of the first WTC attack Bush wasn't lying because "If the president knew it was false, then what was his plan..."

Perhaps he was counting on strawman arguments by his defenders and apologists.

S