Remember when Dan Rather reported on forged documents without verifying the facts? Bloggers jumped on the case, and it wasn't long until Rather was out of a job.

Well, the report about Iraq attempting to purchase yellow-cake uranium from Niger, which I thought was simple faulty intelligence, was actually a forgery. This may be old news, but I wasn't aware until now that the document that started the Plamegate affair was deliberately faked.

Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which started when an Italian journalist obtained documents that appeared to show officials of the government of Niger helping to supply the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with Yellowcake uranium. This claim, which made its way into President Bush's State of the Union address in January, 2003, was based on falsified documents from Niger and was later withdrawn by the White House.

So Bush, like Rather, used a forged document, and Bush, like Rather, failed to verify its authenticity. Where are the bloggers now who were chastizing Rathers for failing to do his homework? The consequences of Rather's mistake cost far fewer lives than Bush's.