James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal writes this in his "Best of the Web" column today (citing this CNN.com story):

Hillary: My Hubby, Not Bush, Lied

Sen. Hillary Clinton appeared Tuesday on CNN's "Larry King Live," and CNN describes an interesting exchange:

The lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq contradicts years of intelligence indicating Saddam had such weapons, which also was the conclusion of officials in the Clinton administration.

"The consensus was the same, from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration," she said. "It was the same intelligence belief that our allies and friends around the world shared.

"But I think that in the case of the [Bush] administration, they really believed it. They really thought they were right, but they didn't let enough sunlight into their thinking process to really have the kind of debate that needs to take place when a serious decision occurs like that."

So the Clintonites and the Bushies both said Saddam Hussein has weapons. The difference is that the latter "really believed it." The former didn't really believe it, but they said it anyway. So it turns out it was CLINTON who LIED!!!!

Clever. But you can arrive at a completely different reading of the quote by changing one period to a comma and one capital letter to a lowercase letter (remember, the sentence structure was the work not of Hillary, but of a CNN transcriber):

"But I think that in the case of the [Bush] administration, they really believed it, they really thought they were right, but they didn't let enough sunlight into their thinking process to really have the kind of debate that needs to take place when a serious decision occurs like that."

See the difference? Now the misjudgment Hillary's describing isn't that the Bushies "believed it," but rather that "they didn't let enough sunlight into their thinking process to really have the kind of debate that needs to take place when a serious decision" -- committing the U.S. to war -- occurs like that."

Big difference.