In no particular order:
1) Kevin Drum is right about many things, but most notably about this one:

[E]ven if the specific evidence in the State of the Union speech was dubious, what was the general prewar assessment of Saddam's nuclear bomb program? Should George Bush have been talking about it at all?
So I pulled my copy of The Threatening Storm off the shelf and reread the section on nuclear weapons (pp. 173-175). It's unequivocal: writing in late 2002, Kenneth Pollack says there is a "consensus" that Iraq has an active nuclear program; it employs as many as 14,000 workers; experts "unanimously" agree that Iraq is working to enrich uranium; and Iraq might be able to build a bomb as early as 2004.
But unlike chemical and biological weapons, which might yet be found, a nuclear program is too big to hide. If we haven't found it by now, it just doesn't exist, and that means that something that was "unanimously" agreed upon in late 2002 has turned out to be flatly wrong.
By the end of January, with UN inspectors roaming freely around Iraq, the evidence for a nuclear program was dwindling fast. For some reason, though, Bush's advisors felt that chemical and biological weapons weren't enough for his State of the Union speech, so they seized on what little was left in order to keep the threat of nuclear bombs alive. That's bad enough, but even worse is how the collective intelligence agencies of the world misjudged what was happening in Iraq so badly. This isn't a small point of interpretation, it's a case of absolute certainty about a massive technical and industrial program that turned out to be complete fiction.
How did that happen?
(Emphasis added.)

Leaving out the obvious caveats about how it is still far too early to say that Iraq's nuclear program is a "complete fiction" and "if we haven't found it by now, it doesn't exist" (after all, the first round of inspectors didn't find Iraq's nuclear program until directed to it by defector Hussein Kamel, four years after inspections began), Kevin is absolutely right that the Niger "gotcha" game is a stand-in for the real issue of whether the world's intelligence services completely misread the situation. And if so, that scandal far outstrips any question of whether a particular claim should or should not have been in the State of the Union address. (For one, it clearly pre-dates the Bush administration, so the question of whether they improperly bullied the CIA is irrelevant.) And on the tactical level, this conflation - clearly being encouraged by some administration critics - will likely backfire, as the storm over the second question will likely dissipate once the US finds some store of chemical weapons - which (I think) is still likely - and also defusing the "Bush lied" storyline.
2) I still think that administration critics like Josh Marshall are semi-willfully blinding themselves to the main message of the Administration's arguments for the war. And because of that, I think they are overstating the importance of the Niger/uranium claim.
3) The "Bush lied" string is clearly based, in large part, on resentment over the way Republicans treated President Clinton and the 2000 election, and the according desire for revenge. Don't believe me? Ask Michael Tomasky, showing signs of Kool-Aid overdose. I found this piece strangely gripping:

Here, distilled into four paragraphs, is the liberal interpretation of the last 10 years.
After a long and in some ways well-earned stroll in the wilderness, Democrats finally elect one of their own to the presidency. He is a prodigiously talented man. He has flaws, to be sure, and some of them are important. But far more important is the way the rules of the game change upon his ascension. On election night, the nation's leading Republican goes on television and snorts that the victory is illegitimate; from that point on, a campaign is waged to destroy -- not tarnish or discredit or soften up, but destroy -- the new president and his wife. This campaign has no precedent in American political history. (Please spare us the Alexander-Hamilton-and-his-mistress parallel; the 1790s are not parallel to today's world, and Hamilton was attacked by one yellow journalist, not a network of operatives with tens of millions of dollars to spend.) Finally, he is caught in flagrante. Even then, the public asserts directly and repeatedly that it does not consider the offense a high crime or misdemeanor.
But no matter. Against the clear will of the people, impeachment proceeds. It fails, but the hounding, again mostly over pseudo-scandals (like a West Wing ransacking) that never happened but are endlessly hyped by a frivolous media, continues. And in its way, this technique succeeds: What was objectively a bountiful and comparatively humane period in American history -- prosperity, peace, low crime, reduced poverty, international goodwill; an era that should have demonstrated that Democrats knew how to run the country and left the GOP badly marginalized -- is successfully tarnished.
So the vice president seeks the presidency. He runs a soggy campaign, true. But again, it's beyond dispute that the majority of Americans who go to the polls intend for him to be the president. Yet he loses -- according to the rules, at least. But somehow the experience of the previous eight years has left us with the distinct feeling that, had the situation been reversed, other rules would have been found to ensure the same result. We are admonished to "get over it" by people we know would not have gotten over it if things had gone the other way.
The Republican takes over. For eight months, he convinces precious few who didn't vote for him that he's the man for the job. But then unprecedented tragedy occurs. Americans, the vast majority of liberals included, rally around their country; by and large we support War No. 1. We have serious reservations about War No. 2. But by now something more disturbing than a mere policy dispute has occurred. By now, simply asking questions, or refusing to accept the government's assertions at face value, is denounced as something tantamount to treason. We find this, um, troubling: Open debate and vigorous dissent, we were raised to believe, were once considered the quintessential American values. Now, they are taken as prima facie evidence of anti-Americanism. (We note also how ardently the other side seemed to believe in vigorous dissent when its members were the dissenters.) In Georgia, a man (and sitting senator) who sacrificed his body for his country is labeled unpatriotic. The president has it well within his power, by simply uttering a few morally forceful sentences, to put an end to this madness. But the demonization of the other side is what keeps him afloat politically, and he refuses to do so -- and, in the Georgia instance, goes so far as to implicitly play along.

Even if that description is 100% accurate (and I'm resisting the temptation to unload on the accusation of "asking questions=treason"), this is the best illustration of David Brooks' diagnosis of self-defeating rage. Ask the mischievous Mark Steyn:

They’ve let post-impeachment, post-chad-dangling bitterness unhinge them to the point where, given a choice between investigating the intelligence lapses that led to 9/11 and the intelligence lapses that led to a victorious war in Iraq, they stampede for the latter. Iraq was a brilliant campaign fought with minimal casualties, 11 September was a humiliating failure by government to fulfill its primary role of national defence. But Democrats who complained that Bush was too slow to act on doubtful intelligence re 9/11 now profess to be horrified that he was too quick to act on doubtful intelligence re Iraq. This is not a serious party.

Or ask the judicious John Judis, whose belief in an emerging Democratic majority does not blind him to the fact that Howard Dean's rage-based campaign is likely to end disastrously for the Democrats (ad viewing required):

Even if the United States remains bogged down in Iraq, and even if popular doubts about the invasion and occupation grow, Americans are still likely to credit Bush with trying to wage a vigorous war against terror. And they will consider voting for a Democratic candidate only if they believe he can do likewise. The Republicans will argue that an antiwar candidate like Dean who has no foreign policy experience is ill-equipped to protect the country from attack. And a lot of people will believe those charges. At the least, a candidate like Dean will have to spend a vital part of his campaign defending his credentials on homeland security and the war against terror rather than attacking Bush's economic program. Think of Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis (who, unlike Dean, served in the armed forces) unsuccessfully defending his foreign policy credentials against Bush's father in 1988.
...To put it in regional terms: Dean, a culturally libertarian New Englander who opposed the war, could virtually forget about winning any Southern or border states. Southerners are willing to support a Southern Democrat like Clinton with whom they can identify, but they will not vote for a Dukakis or Dean. Dean would not simply get trounced in the South: His candidacy would allow Bush to take the entire South for granted and move all his resources into states like Michigan and Pennsylvania that the Democrats have to win. In the end, Dean would be lucky to hold on to Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, D.C., Maryland, Illinois, Minnesota, California, Oregon, and Washington.

A final reason for why the "Bush lied" theme is mostly based on resentment and desire for revenge. Ronald Reagan made all sorts of weird economic claims (held in at least as much contempt by the professional economic set as Bush's claims) and other, shall we say, reality-challeneged statements. (I like the guy, but it's true.) While Democrats savaged him on all sorts of grounds, I don't recall them calling him a "liar" 250,000 times a day. That doesn't make it right to misuse/mangle/ignore facts, but you do get tired of seeing it called "unprecedented" on the NYT op-ed page twice a week when it's simply untrue. (A lie?)
After all, to quote Steyn again:

In 1998, when Bill Clinton launched mid-Monica cruise-missile attacks on Afghanistan and the Sudan, he hit a Khartoum aspirin factory and missed Osama bin Laden. The claims that the aspirin factory was producing nerve gas and was an al-Qa’eda front proved to be untrue. Does that mean Clinton lied to us?

4) Finally, the notorious site run by Al Gore's old roomate, the Daily Howler, has twice defended Bush against the charges of Niger-based lies (here and here; with links from Instapundit.).
After those posts, I will take their criticisms of George Bush and the media much more seriously.

Here's an interesting article on the looting of the Iraqi National Museum:

The most striking fact to emerge from discussions with those living or working around the museum is that, in the days before and during the looting, they saw the museum being turned into a major military defensive position by Iraqi forces.
In plain violation of the Hague Convention of 1954, Iraqi fighters occupied the museum complex and used it as a combat position for at least three days after museum staff had fled. Neighborhood residents corroborated the charges made by American forces that the Americans had come under attack from inside the museum grounds and that fighting in the area was heavy. Even as they criticized the Americans for not protecting their national treasures, Iraqi witnesses to the looting said that Saddam Hussein's forces had turned the museum into a small arsenal.
...U.S. forces have cited armed resistance from inside the complex as the main reason they could not seal off the museum and prevent the looting. In the end, they protected it only after they had defeated the last remnants of Saddam's forces in the area.
The looting began on Thursday, April 10, and lasted two days, as the battle between U.S. and Iraqi forces raged through the city.
..."Clearly there was a group of people who went through the museum filling in a list of things to steal," said U.S. Marine Corps Col. Matthew Bogdanos, who until late May led the 13-man U.S. team investigating the looting. "The person who looted that storage magazine knew just what he wanted. He could find it in the dark."
...The hugely exaggerated claims about the extent of the plunder diverted attention from the looting of ancient sites all over Iraq, a genuine cultural catastrophe, said archeologists. Unlike the museum objects, artifacts wrenched from the ground are impossible to identify or track and can easily be given phony provenances to disguise their origins. The market for Mesopotamian antiquities is likely to see a huge influx of supply over the next few years as fresh loot comes onto the market. "Anything that the U.S. military isn't sitting on is being destroyed," said Mr. Gibson. "The collectors who buy this stuff are going to be happy."

Which big-time blogger authored this piece in the Economist about the U.S.' budget deficit?
And as long as we're on the subject, check out this Paul Samuelson piece about future spending ahead:

Growing older will alert baby boomers to other inconvenient government policies that they may well try to alter. Consider:
• Nursing homes: By 2020 the 85-and-over population is expected to rise 54 percent to 6.8 million. Nursing home spending will explode. At present, the government covers only about 60 percent of the costs, mostly through Medicaid -- a program that requires that people become virtually impoverished before qualifying. Will there be a push for more generous coverage? Seems likely.
• Retirement savings: In 2001 workers had an estimated $2.3 trillion in individual retirement accounts and $2.1 trillion in 401(k)-type pensions. On withdrawal, most of this money faces ordinary tax rates. Will baby boomers clamor for preferential tax rates? Seems likely.
Who will pay for all this generosity? Our children, and their children. Under present policies, Social Security and Medicare spending will rise about 75 percent by 2030, projects the Congressional Budget Office. Our children will pay higher taxes, face higher budget deficits or receive fewer other government services. New retiree benefits or tax preferences increase the burden. There are questions of generational justice; high taxes or deficits may also hurt economic growth.
What we have needed -- and have not gotten -- is a rewriting of the generational compact, reflecting new social realities (longer life expectancies, more retirees, more private retirement savings). No president has addressed the issues candidly and risked the resulting unpopularity. We ought to be discussing how much people should pay for their retirement and what the public safety net should cover. But there's been no demand, especially among baby boomers, for candor.
The press amplifies the indifference. Somehow the mainstream press -- led by baby boomers -- regards new retirement benefits as "progressive" and dissociates them from higher future taxes or deficits. Coverage of the drug benefit has virtually ignored the issue of long-term costs. Experts at the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute have strongly criticized the congressional plans. Their views have received scant attention. Press skepticism focuses on the stinginess of the new benefit. Reflecting journalistic conformity, The Post and the New York Times both ran front-page stories on June 26 in which retirees complained that the yet-to-be-passed drug benefit was inadequate.

One of the items on my to-blog list was this piece by Ralph Wiley in which he calls Bill James a racist for pointing out that stolen bases are often overvalued relative to their actual worth. But the Baseball Crank has already set Wiley right in pleasing and efficient fashion.
UPDATE: Eric McErlain has done so, as well.

Thomas Boswell "gets" Moneyball more than most of his sportswriter comrades. But even he, along with many observers, misses the point to a degree.
In his generally solid review of the book and its ramifications, Boswell reduced the "Billy Beane method" to a list of a few factors. And his summary is technically accurate. But it misses the point, which Lewis and Beane take care to stress: that open-mindedness and the ability to search for and accept new evidence are more important than any given maxim.
And that is the best answer to questions like the one contained in an e-mail I received today from a friend:
"How many teams need to operate by those rules before the "overvaluing" stops? Once the A's, Red Sox, and Blue Jays are operating this way, can they all contend every year?"
As Rob Neyer says:

[T]he real key to Billy Beane's success, and also to his continued success (assuming that he continues to succeed): Billy's ahead of the curve. Let's assume, for a moment, that the A's draft philosophy works, and further that it's copied by a number of other teams. That's going to create a problem for those teams, because they'll all be competing for the same players, right?
And how do you solve that problem? By coming up with a new philosophy. And which organization is best-equipped to come up with a new philosophy?
I don't know. Maybe it's the A's, but the Red Sox are well-equipped, and so are the Blue Jays, and maybe the Indians and a few other teams. My point is that if the A's fall back to the pack, it won't be due to other baseball executives reading Moneyball, and it won't be due to other teams copying the A's philosophies. If the A's fall back to the pack, it will be due to a deficiency in management.

There is always more to learn. And the true lesson of Billy Beane's success, and of Moneyball, is that a willingness to learn and adapt will eventually trump a static list of rules.
Here are a couple of examples. The book describes how the A's used a system inspired by Wall Street's valuation of derivatives to calculate the defensive value of Johnny Damon as compared to Terence Long, and how while the difference was extreme by defensive standards, it was a) not as great as the difference in offensive value between extreme players and b) more efficient to make up the difference by adding more offense.
While a) is generally true, b) was a fact-specific conclusion. Another organization might take the moral of the story to be "always value offense over defense." In that case, they would likely overlook the occasional easy availability of an outstanding defensive center fielder who can't hit much. Someone like Chris Singleton, who now patrols center field for Billy Beane's Oakland A's. In that case, his defensive abilities were undervalued, and the A's took advantage of the inefficiency.
Here's another thought. As I've noted before, the biggest flaw in the book is the omission what the A's are doing with their pitcher development. Supposedly they haven't had a major surgery in their organization in years (though I haven't checked that assertion) - by contrast, the Yankees should've gotten a group discount on "Tommy John" surgeries over the last couple of years. Their program is based on a combination of avoiding high school pitchers, constant work with mechanics based on an institute run by Dr. James Andrews (the surgeon who does most major pitcher surgeries), pitch counts, and other things. It's still unclear if they've discovered the secret to pitcher development, but it's looking good.
What if they really have learned the secrets to avoiding pitcher injuries? Maybe in a few years the A's will decide they should shift to preferring high school pitchers - that way, you keep them in-house for longer and avoid the risk that college coaches will shred their arms. That will shock all those who have read Moneyball and taken from it the message "high school pitchers=bad." But the A's may be ahead of the curve again.

I've started and stopped a few posts on the "Bush lied"/"Uranium/Niger" story and keep either getting sidetracked or bogged down in trying to link all the worthy items being written on the subject (from all sides). I've decided to link to this Daniel Drezner item and say "Indeed." (Very eloquent, if I may say so myself.)
OK, I can't resist linking to this David Brooks piece from a few weeks ago about the Democrats' creeping insanity:

Fury rarely wins elections. Rage rarely appeals to suburban moderates. And there is a mountain of evidence that the Democrats are now racing away from swing voters, who do not hate George Bush, and who, despite their qualms about the economy and certain policies, do not feel that the republic is being raped by vile and illegitimate marauders. The Democrats, indeed, look like they're turning into a domestic version of the Palestinians--a group so enraged at their perceived oppressors, and so caught up in their own victimization, that they behave in ways that are patently not in their self-interest, and that are almost guaranteed to perpetuate their suffering.
When you talk to Democratic strategists, you find they do have rationalizations for the current aggressive thrust. In 2003, it's necessary to soften Bush up with harsh attacks, some say. In 2004, we'll put on a happier face. Others argue that Democrats tried to appeal to moderate voters in 2002 and it didn't work. The key to victory in 2004 is riling up the liberal base. Still others say that with all the advantages Bush has--incumbency, victory in Iraq, the huge fundraising lead--Democrats simply have to roll the dice and behave radically.
But all of these explanations have a post-facto ring. Democratic strategists are trying to put a rational gloss on what is a visceral, unplanned, and emotional state of mind. Democrats may or may not be behaving intelligently, but they are behaving sincerely. Their statements are not the product of some Dick Morris-style strategic plan. This stuff wasn't focus-grouped. The Democrats are letting their inner selves out for a romp.