Today Bush gave yet another speech aimed at pumping up support for the Iraq War, and this time he seems to have been more forthcoming than usual about the faulty intelligence that led the U.S. into Iraq:

WASHINGTON - President Bush accepted responsibility on Wednesday for going to war with faulty intelligence, but firmly defended a decision that has deeply divided the country…

“It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As president I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq,” the president told a foreign policy forum on the eve of elections to establish Iraq’s first permanent, democratically elected government. “And I’m also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities. And we’re doing just that.”

Late as this admission of the obvious is, at least it gets the average American closer to the natural next question: How exactly did the Bush administration get something so important so wrong? Did it intentionally get the intelligence wrong, or was it an honest mistake? Bush doesn’t want to talk much about that. His answer to those questions in the speech is basically: Wrong intelligence, right result. Move on. Nothing to see here.

The Democrats’ response: Yeah, right. The maddening part: They don’t control Congress, and therefore have no subpoena power to get to the bottom of the way the war was sold. When that could all change: 2006.