What happens when you base a big project on questionable information?

Well, if you work for CBS News, you get a pink slip. If you work for George W. Bush, you get a promotion or a medal.

It's telling that this should be so, given that the stakes in the cases at hand are so wildly uneven.

The use of unverifiable documents for a story about Bush's National Guard service 30 years ago was a huge blunder, to be sure, and CBS did what it had to do for the sake of its damaged credibility. It sought an outside investigation by former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and retired Associated Press President Louis Boccardi; the network adopted their recommendations and also fired the four people it held most accountable.

Yet in the hierarchy of screw-ups with serious repercussions for the country, that incident pales next to the bad intelligence and flawed assumptions that have informed our war in Iraq and all the fruit of its poisoned tree.

That would include 1,352 U.S. soldiers killed and 10,252 wounded in action so far; the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib; the Rumsfeld doctrine of going to war with too few soldiers and too little armor; the depletion of the National Guard; the back-door draft of the military "stop loss" policy; and the "de-Baathification" of Iraqi forces that experts believe has fueled the insurgency.

On a damage-to-America scale of one to 10, I'd have to rank the second scenario as a bit more critical than a badly sourced news story -- especially when that story was essentially an old one that viewers had either accepted or rejected many months earlier, based largely on their political predispositions.

It was news to no one that Bush used family connections to get into the Texas Air National Guard to avoid combat in Vietnam. In the partisan atmosphere of the 2004 campaign, nobody was going to vote for or against him based on whether he'd complied with all his military requirements at that time.

Thus, if the producers hoped to sway the outcome by rushing to air with the "smoking gun" memo right before the election (and the outside review said there was no evidence of a political agenda), they risked their careers for nothing. The story was essentially a big yawn.

Still, it did great harm to the integrity of CBS, and, by extension, the news media at large. Heads had to roll, and they did.

One might wish for the president of the United States to admit a fraction of the responsibility for his administration's mistakes, to hold his war architects and advisers at least as responsible as CBS has its producers.

Instead, Bush honored former CIA Director George Tenet with a Presidential Medal of Honor -- this to the man who called it "a slam dunk" that Saddam Hussein possessed those missing WMDs. He nominated Alberto Gonzales, author of the infamous torture-justification memo, to be his next attorney general. And he continues to laud Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for doing "a great job," despite the secretary's callous comment to front-line soldiers in Iraq that their equipment was substandard because "you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want."

What accounts for this contrast in responsibility-taking? The answer is one I've argued in this space before: Americans demand a higher standard of truth from the news media than they do from their political leaders. They expect politicians to lie, mislead and dissemble, and they expect the news media to catch them.

But even when reporters uncover such transgressions, it doesn't necessarily translate into changes in policy or admissions of guilt. That has certainly been true of this president, who values loyalty above competence and evidences not the slightest inkling of his own fallibility. Now that the voters have seen fit to re-elect him, the nation can expect the same, only more so.

We can only imagine what kind of report Thornburgh and Boccardi would assemble on the administration's conduct of the war. Five'll get you 10 they'd find a lot more guns smoking in the White House than they ever did at CBS.