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Go read Slate's Jacob Weisberg on Bush, Cheney and pre-war intelligence deception:
It's kind of tragic that the obvious has become necessary to restate again and again in a kind of useless he said, he said situation, that is of course by design. But the real news is - even in GOP strongholds like Kansas - it does not seem to be working so well anymore. It really doesn't hold up. One could just sense, a kind of crankiness and bad humor from straight-GOP voters that comes from having to defend something they are really tired of having to defend (the Bush administration's performance).... Here's what we do know already, without a congressional inquiry: Members of the Bush Administration were dishonest with the public and with Congress about prewar intelligence. We've known this for some time—see, for example, the comprehensive and damning story Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus wrote in the Washington Post in August 2003 ("Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence"). Over the past two years, several incidents of executive-branch dishonesty in the run-up to the war have turned into subscandals of their own: the aluminum tubes that Iraq used for missiles and not gas centrifuges, the yellowcake uranium that Saddam didn't try to buy from Niger, the mobile biological warfare laboratories that turned out to be hydrogen generators for balloons, the al-Qaida chemical warfare training that was based on a false confession, the meeting with Mohamed Atta that didn't happen in Prague.
If you examine these and other pillars of the administration's case for invading Iraq, a clear pattern emerges. Bush officials first put clear pressure on the intelligence community to support their assumptions that Saddam was developing WMD and cooperating with al-Qaida. Nonetheless, significant contrary evidence emerged. Bush hawks then overlooked, suppressed, or willfully ignored whatever cut against their views. In public, they depicted unsettled questions as dead certainties. Then, when they were caught out and proven wrong, they resisted the obvious and refused to correct the record. Finally, when their positions became utterly untenable, they claimed that they were misinformed or not told. Call this behavior what you will, but you can't describe it as either "honest" or "truthful." ...
People who want to be deceived may find some comfort in the continued Cheney song and dance, and it's extraordinary to witness the talking points parroted back almost word for word from the memo via Fox news, but hard poll numbers show that bunch is a decreasing if significant minority and it's the same group that is never going anywhere. They would vote for Nixon again too. Regime dead enders, if you will. But there is really interesting splintering going on inside the Republican base that will be interesting to track over the coming months: the Cheney/national security Republicans are not the Christian conservatives who are not the fiscal conservatives, and each group is highly disgruntled, and feels poked at and victimized. (Perhaps most interesting are the signs that national security Republicans are splitting as well, subject as they are to mixed signals coming from the Bush administration about what it intends to do in Iraq; after all, the administration is trying to have it both ways, arguing Iraq is the central front in the war on terror, while insisting it never connected Saddam and al Qaeda; secondly that it may be looking for ways to pretend the Iraqis have instantly achieved performance benchmarks designed to allow a US drawdown in time for the 2006 midterms). The Bush administration's performance and Iraq -- not so much the Democrats -- are driving these groups further apart and creating fissures inside their national security wing (although for strategic purposes, the administration would very much like to convince its side that they are coming under assault from the "shrill" Dems, not from its own self-destruction; typical tactic of demagogues is to hype the threat from the outside enemy; the Dems have an interest in making it seem like they are agents of this phenomenon too).
Why it matters is not that these folks are going to be voting for Hillary Clinton as far as I can tell, but that it seems the GOP is going to have a truly difficult time finding a candidate who can bring these groups enthusiastically together in 2008 (though of course, it's still early). At the same time, Democrats finally seem to be coming towards some consensus on some of the major issues that have been dividing them, particularly Iraq, and their position seems closer to what's become the national consensus, one the administration may like to get behind, but which all of its inflammatory rhetoric has pilloried for the past couple years. The gap between what the Bush administration says and what it does is the common theme that is going to be increasingly difficult even for the professional spinmeisters to reconcile, since it really goes to the heart of the administration's credibility problems.