Inconvenient Facts . . .

There are no stubborn facts in the Bush White House, just stubborn men. This is an administration that will not be cowed by the truth.

The International Atomic Energy Agency had publicly reported that the documents purportedly recording the Iraq-Niger transaction were forgeries -- a conclusion, we now know, that the CIA and the State Department shared. Indeed, when the State Department turned over the documents to the IAEA on Feb. 4, it sent along a note stating, "We cannot confirm these reports and have questions regarding some specific claims."

But when "Meet The Press" host Tim Russert asked the vice president about the IAEA's conclusions, Cheney bulled ahead with a certitude born of -- well, of the political necessity for certitude. He disagreed with the IAEA, he said, adding, wrongly, "You'll find that the CIA, for example, and other key parts of our intelligence community disagree."

As for Saddam, he said, "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. [Mohamed] ElBaradei [the IAEA director], frankly, is wrong. And I think if you look at the track record of the International Atomic Energy Agency [on] this kind of issue, especially where Iraq's concerned, they have consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing."

The point is not that an apology is in order, though it plainly is. The point is that even after the IAEA's revelation that the forged agreement had been "signed" by a Niger government official who in fact had been out of office for the better part of a decade, the vice president dismissed this information out of hand and disparaged its source. He did not, however, refute it. Refutations plunge you into the realm of facts, where this administration is exquisitely uncomfortable.

Those of us who've called for investigations of whether the administration slanted its intelligence should be abashed. What's to investigate? Here's a member of the administration's Defense Policy Board who argues in print that the very purpose of intelligence is to confirm the president's vision of a proper planet.

My friends on the left fear the administration's budding imperialism. I'm more concerned by its raging anti-empiricism.