President Bush’s interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson this week was the “first of several planned ‘exit interviews.’” According to White House press secretary Dana Perino, Bush’s next interview will be with ABC’s Cynthia McFadden on the topic of the faith-based initiative. It will air on Nightline next week. If the first interview with Gibson provides any clue as to what we can expect from these interviews, Bush will paint a rosy picture of his legacy and “refuse to take responsibility for a single thing that went wrong on his watch.” Heather at Crooks and Liars catches the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes revealing that Karl Rove is currently orchestrating the Bush legacy project:

[T]here’s an ongoing Bush legacy project that’s been meeting in the White House, really, with senior advisers, Karl Rove, Karen Hughes has been involved, current senior Bush administration advisers and they are looking at how to sort of roll out the President’s legacy.

BUSH: I'll be frank with you. I don't spend a lot of time really worrying about short-term history. I guess I don't worry about long-term history, either, since I'm not going to be around to read it -- (laughter) -- but, look, in this job you just do what you can. The thing that's important for me is to get home and look in that mirror and say, I did not compromise my principles. And I didn't. I made tough calls. And some presidencies have got a lot of tough decisions to make--

In what was a remarkable admission that contradicted - to a large extent - the past statements from his onetime boss, former Bush strategist Karl Rove said on Tuesday evening that had the President known Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction, the United States would not have gone to war.

"In the aftermath of 9/11 the concern was about a tyrant accused of enormous human rights abuses," but who also possessed weapons of mass destruction, said Rove. "Absent that, I suspect that the administration's course of action would have been to work to find more creative ways to constrain him like in the 90s."

The remarks, delivered at a debate in New York on Bush's legacy, came amidst a vigorous defense by Rove on behalf of the war's purpose and outcome.

The big news orgs seem eager to help Bush do this. Not a single one of their reports on the interview that we can find bothered to tell readers that there was plenty of good intel -- ignored by the Bush administration -- saying that Saddam wasn't the threat Bush was claiming he was. Nor did any of them bother mentioning that the weapons inspectors in Iraq were saying the same thing -- something that also went ignored.

These facts are absolutely central to understanding Bush's efforts to falsify history in yesterday's interview. Yet they went unmentioned in reports by Reuters, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, CNN, and The New York Times.

Worse, at least one news org pretended that Bush was making some kind of admission or concession here. WaPo hailed Bush's "candor" and said he was being "unusually blunt."

Let's go over this very slowly. For Bush to blame the failure of intel for his decision to invade is not a concession at all, and it is not an admission of failure on his part. Rather, it is the opposite of these things. It is an evasion of responsibility for what happened.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — the younger brother of the president — is weighing a run for the Senate seat currently held by Republican Mel Martinez.

Martinez announced Tuesday that he will not seek reelection in 2010. Asked whether he was interested in running for the seat then, Bush told Politico by e-mail Tuesday night: “I am considering it.”