When Bill Clinton said “I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky”, we didn’t take his word for it.

When Bush says he declassified the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate before asking Cheney to have it leaked, why should we take his word for it? If there is no evidence that he declassified it before asking Cheney to have it leaked, no evidence beyond the self-serving statements of the President and Vice-President, how can we simply take their word for it? Especially since the track records of both men make it so agonizingly difficult to decide who is more deserving to be crowned Biggest Liar in the Administration.

No one in the administration has disputed Libby’s claim that Bush asked Cheney to have carefully selected bits from the October 2003 NIE leaked to the press—not Scott McClellan, not Dick Cheney, not George Bush. (Not even the most famous honorary press spokesman in the world, Katharine Armstrong, ranch owner.) Under the circumstances, it seems reasonable to accept Libby’s claim as true.

The claim that Bush declassified the NIE first, before giving Cheney those instructions, is just that, an unverifiable claim.

Karl Rove has been trying to present a self-serving, unverifiable explanation for why his initial grand jury testimony was factually incorrect—he just clean forgot that he had revealed Valerie Plame’s name to Matthew Cooper of Time, and did not remember till after Viveca Novak (also of Time) let it slip to Rove’s lawyer that she had passed on that little tidbit to Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigators.

Despite that self-serving, unverifiable explanation, Rove has been subject to relentless investigation, because of the gravity of the charges. And if the rumor mill is to be believed, there is a strong likelihood that Rove will be indicted very soon.

The charge against Bush – that he directed classified information to be leaked to the press for purely political purposes – is certainly more serious than the one against Rove. At what point do the wheels of justice start turning, to investigate these charges?