Last July, the Washington Post devoted much of its front-page to a well-reported story indicting National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice for her role in misleading Congress and the public in the run-up to the Iraq war. The bottom line: Rice was either incompetent or a liar.

Even sources described as “generally sympathetic” to the NSC adviser questioned her many shifting and contradictory statements regarding Iraq’s alleged uranium purchase and the WMD (non)threat. But Rice’s dogged loyalty to Bush served her well, and she stayed put.

In August, barely noticed during the campaign, former chief weapons inspector David Kay went before Congress and in impassioned testimony spent most of his time faulting Rice for botching intelligence information before the war. Kay’s remarks reflected a widespread view among intelligence specialists that Rice and the NSC have never been held sufficiently accountable for intelligence failures before the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq.

Bush’s nomination of Rice to replace Colin Powell as Secretary of State today is just another sign of how this Administration continues to define failure down. As even the Washington Post‘s lead editorial this morning acknowledged: “…It is a measure of the stunning absence of accountability under Mr. Bush that it is Mr. Powell who leaves, while the architects of the failed and even disastrous policies [Powell] opposed, from postwar Iraq to Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, remain in office.”