With all the hullahbaloo about the Woodward book, it’d be easy not to notice that the book helps Bush in a number of key ways, much as the Clarke book did.

First of all, it needs to be reiterated that Bush’s critics from the Salon-Moore-Deaniac-Naderite crowd have not had consistent lines of attack on him. They’ve accepted the proposition that all criticisms of Bush are valid, including the ones which contradict each other. So just as a matter of math, the Clarke and Woodward books eliminate numerous criticisms which thrived in an environment of ignorance. By embracing Clarke and Woodward’s accounts critics of Bush cannot have the luxury of also embracing theories which are directly contradicted by Clarke and Woodward.

I’ve already mentioned, for example, Joe Conason’s lost outrage over Bush’s plane ride after 9/11.

Now, the Woodward

account offers nothing but refutation to the ongoing — and I fear undying — charge that Bush lied, made-up and otherwise faked the WMD threat. According to Woodward’s account, George Tenet swore the WMD case was a “slam dunk” case and that Bush even pressed him hard for more and better evidence.

As for the other “controversies” from the book — that Bush allegedly decided earlier than previously revealed that war was on the table, that the Saudis agreed to sell cheap oil around election time, that Bush didn’t consult with Cheney, Rumsfeld or Powell when he made the final decision — these also undercut some of the favorite lines about Bush.

For example, the notion that Bush was determined from the begining to go to war runs — and always has run — completely counter to charge that he was pushed into war by the perfidious warmongering Jews and/or honorary Jews called “neoconservatives.” If Bush was always fixated on toppling Saddam, for dad or whatever, then Paul Wolfowitz couldn’t have Jedi mind-tricked him into doing it for Israel.

I should add that Woodward doesn’t say Bush was set on war from the outset, merely that he was determined very soon after 9/11 which is a very defensible position.

Also, if Bush didn’t consult with Cheney until late in the process, it’s harder — though not impossible — to argue that Cheney’s the real power behind the throne.

As for the Saudi allegation, this one is the exception in that it does help the “war for oil” thing. But I’m not sure I buy it or that it has legs. Still the scandal here, if it’s true, isn’t that the Saudis agreed to lower the price of oil, it’s that they haven’t lowered it already. And, aside from the fact that it is impossible to prove such a deal exists or even to prove that Woodward got the story right, I’m not sure Democrats will get a lot of mileage shrieking about unfairly dropping oil prices come August and September.