On Day 78 of the Search for Iraqi W.M.D., yesterday, once again nothing turned up.

Spooks are spitting mad at the way their work was manipulated to exaggerate the Iraqi threat, and they are thus surprisingly loquacious (delighting those of us in journalism). They emphasize that even if weapons of mass destruction still turn up, there is a fundamental problem —not within the intelligence community itself, but with senior administration officials — particularly in the Pentagon.

"As an employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency, I know how this administration has lied to the public to get support for its attack on Iraq," one of my informants rages. Some others see a pattern not so much of lying as of self-delusion — and of subjecting the intelligence agencies to those delusions. ...

As best I can reconstruct events, Mr. Rumsfeld genuinely felt that the C.I.A. and D.I.A. were doing a horrendous job on Iraq — after all, he was hearing much more alarming information from those close to Ahmad Chalabi. So the Pentagon set up its own intelligence unit, and it sifted through everyone else's information and goaded other agencies to come up with more alarmist conclusions.

"He's an ideologist," one man in the spy world said of Mr. Rumsfeld. "He doesn't start with the facts, even though he's quite brainy. He has a bottom line, and then he gathers facts to support the bottom line."

That is not, of course, a capital offense. Pentagon leaders should feel free to disagree strenuously with foolish judgments by the C.I.A. But for the process to work, top C.I.A. officials need to fight back. Instead, George Tenet rolled over.

After two Bush tax cuts, consider how we now burden people at the bottom and at the top of the economic ladder.

A minimum-wage worker today must pay the FICA payroll tax of 15 percent (if you include the employer's share, as economists agree you should) on the very first dollar she earns. If she has children, she may qualify for an earned income tax credit, but she may not. If she works hard and moves up the income scale, she'll soon be paying another 15 percent in income tax. You might call this "double taxation," but President Bush doesn't.

Our minimum-wage worker most likely falls into one of the unadvertised holes in the Bush something-for-everyone tax cut. There is nothing in it for her. This gap around the minimum wage was supposedly inadvertent, and Republicans on Capitol Hill were eager to correct it. But Republican congressional straw boss Tom DeLay said incredibly that he would only allow the alleged correction as part of yet another big tax cut with more goodies for the serious income brackets.

Now look at the fellow who has a few millions or billions. He probably has paid no income tax on most of that pile, since investment profits are taxed only when they are "realized"—i.e., cashed in. Any investment profits that he hasn't cashed in when he cashes in himself escape the income tax forever. If he can hold on for a few years, under current plans, the estate tax will die before he does. His investment income also is exempt from the 15 percent FICA tax that hits the minimum-wage worker at dollar 1.

And now the tax rate on both dividends and capital gains is capped at 15 percent. This is supposed to alleviate the unfairness of having both a corporate income tax and a tax on the profits individuals earn on their investments in corporations. This is the one Bush does call "double taxation," and he rails against its injustice. In 2002 the total burden of the corporate income tax was barely one-fifth of the burden of payroll taxes, but it apparently strikes a more sensitive group of people.

So, under the American tax system as designed by the Bush administration and congressional Republicans, the most a person of vast wealth is expected to contribute to the commonweal from his or her last dollar of investment profits is the same 15 cents or so that a minimum-wage worker is expected to pay on his or her first dollar. This does not mean that we have a flat tax. We have a tax system of vast complexity, with wildly different tax burdens on different people. But we have a tax system that, on balance, knows who's in charge.

Now I know how Republicans felt in 1998. Back then, the pursuers of Bill Clinton could simply not believe that the public was not rising up in rebellion against a president who had received Oval Office blow jobs from an employee and then lied about it. But the economy was zipping along, and the polls showed that a large majority of Americans approved of the Clinton's (official) performance in the White House. Many conservative and GOP partisans were stunned by this outrage gap, with some even wondering what this said about the morals of the citizenry. Were people willing to ignore degenerate behavior and deceit for the sake of their 401(k)s?

...

Today the outrage gap is on the other foot. Bush has been misleading the public about critical elements of his presidency, and yet there has been no outcry. Sure, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has been screaming about Bush's lies, as have a few other liberal pundits ( moi , included). The Democrats have taken a stab at branding him a deceiver. For awhile, they pushed the mantra, he says one thing, and does another. But that never took off. Bush's approval ratings remain in the mid-60s, not astronomically high, but higher than he deserves.

President George W. Bush is a draft dodger. And his cowardice is the worst kind. Mr. Bush avoided both combat and making any kind of political statement on the War in Vietnam. While others served, giving their lives and limbs, or took part in a protest movement to end the war, the president's family connections got him a safe spot in the Texas Air National Guard. This is not the profile of a leader....

And now, by stepping into a flight uniform and appearing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, the president has insulted the men and women who served honorably in Iraq, and the more than 58 thousand heroes whose names are etched into black granite in Washington, and the surviving Vietnam Vets.

Since Mr. Bush seems oblivious, perhaps it is our duty, as citizens, to be ashamed for him. We are also obligated to ask, "Who fought in your place, Mr. President?"

At the beginning in the galaxy of Republican presidents, there was Abraham Lincoln as the Great Emancipator. Then we had Ronald Reagan as the Great Communicator. Now, in George W. Bush, we have the Great Justifier.

The current White House occupant demonstrated his talent for coming up with fluctuating justifications for his major actions even before setting foot in the Oval Office.

In the 2000 presidential campaign that finally put him there, he peddled his plan for sharp tax cuts by arguing that with the massive federal surplus then existing, taxpayers had a right to get the extra money back.

But when he became president and the economy started going south (under the Clinton administration, he insisted), Mr. Bush found a new justification for his tax cuts. They were needed, he said, to stimulate the economy. He's still saying it, after two more rounds of cuts.

In his conduct of foreign policy, it's more of the same.

For the first time in history, America is searching for the reason we went to war after the war is over.

As The Times's James Risen reports, a bedrock of the administration's weapons case — the National Intelligence Estimate that concluded that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was seeking nukes — is itself being reassessed. The document is at the center of a broad prewar-intelligence review, being conducted by the C.I.A. to see whether the weapons evidence was cooked.

Conservatives are busily offering a bouquet of new justifications for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq that was sold as self-defense against Saddam's poised and thrumming weapons of mass destruction.

Brits may be more upset with Mr. Blair than Americans are with Mr. Bush because they have the quaint idea that even if you think war was a good idea, you should level with the public about your objectives.

The Democrats — except for a few poorly explained blasts against some of the president's judicial appointees — have behaved with admirable decorum.

The problem is that the Republicans haven't, neither in party councils nor on the air. They — at least the most conservative among them — behave as though they are on a mission to transform America, while the Democrats plead only that they not transform it too much.

The zealotry gives the GOP a huge advantage — for example, freeing it of the necessity of explaining its lies and inconsistencies. Note the graphic "proof" of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Nor do they ever seem embarrassed by the gap between their rhetoric and reality. Columnist Arianna Huffington, herself an outspoken conservative, offers a possible explanation: "The best explanation I can come up with ... is that we are being governed by a gang of out-and-out fanatics," she wrote recently. "The defining trait of the fanatic — be it a Marxist, a fascist, or, gulp, a Wolfowitz — is the utter refusal to allow anything as piddling as evidence to get in the way of an unshakable belief."

Maybe that explains the Republicans. Now will someone explain the Democrats?