Right Wing Nut House

There’s something surreal watching the left’s excitement at the so-called revelations contained in the Downing Street Minutes and their pathetic belief that they finally have the goods on the Bush Administration which will lead to the President’s impeachment.

No less a personality than Representative John Conyers - the man who wanted to hold hearings on the probability that the vote for President in Ohio last fall was rigged - has picked up on the idea that the DSM shows that the Bush Administration should be impeached for…what? The details don’t really matter. It’s enough that once again, the moonbats think they have a political club to beat the Administration over the head. Abu Ghraib? No soap, doc. Koran Abuse? So sorry, please.

Like Bullwinkle’s magician tricks, they keep coming up empty. (”Sorry…wrong hat!”)

Conyers, who more than any other Congressman, panders to the denizens of the leftist fever swamps on the internet, wants to hold hearings on the DSM’s. He also wants office space and pretty much an unlimited budget to do it. For months now, Conyers, who’s Vice Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has taken it upon himself to hold informal hearings or “Forums” on topics the Democrats on the Committee want to highlight - all designed to skewer the Republicans and President Bush of course. Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner played along for a while, but now he’s put his foot down:

Majority spokesman Jeff Lungren said the Republicans have given Democrats three opportunities to make clear that the forums are not official committee business. Nevertheless, Lungren said, in at least one case, members were addressing Conyers as “Mr. Chairman.”

“They were unwilling or unable to make those changes,” Lungren said. “At this point, if they want to hold these forums, they’ll have to find some other place to do it.”

Sean McLaughlin, deputy chief of staff for Sensenbrenner, recently wrote to a minority staffer in more pointed language.

“I’m sitting here watching your `forum’ on C-SPAN,” McLaughlin wrote. “Just to let you know, it was your last. Don’t bother asking [for a room] again.”

Imagine the indignation of the moonbats when they realized that their sideshows have now been sidetracked:

I can’t believe this. The Hill is reporting that James Sensenbrenner will not allow John Conyers to use offices with which to conduct his Downing Street Minutes investigations.

Sensenbrenner may have just handed us the big story that we need, as many of you have noted below. If the MSM was looking for some signal that the Republicans are hiding something here (aside from Bush and Blair presser last week), this should be it.

That tone of pathetic hopefulness is being heard on the left a lot these days. Here’s DU moonbat on NBC “confirming” the authenticity of the DSMs:

NBC News has verified the memos. And they’ve put Andrea Mitchell on the story. This could be the MSM break we’ve been waiting for:

The “confirmation” of the memos would be big news except for one small detail; no one has disputed their authenticity!

What is is it that has engendered so much hope and excitement on the part of the left? It turns out to be a single phrase in these rough minutes of a 2002 meeting between Tony Blair and his defense advisor’s that has set the moonbat hearts racing and blood pumping:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

Both Blair and Bush deny any “fixing” of intelligence. And both the Senate Intel Committee and the 9/11 Commission have cleared the Bush Administration of putting political pressure on analysts to shape intelligence about WMD’s in the lead-up to the Iraq war. So what do the inhabitants of the fever swamps think they have?

It’s VITALLY important, NOW, THIS MINUTE, to do something about it, to further this story, to give it water and sunshine and nourishment. Follow this up with a call to your congressman/woman (or SOMEBODY ELSE’S congressman/woman, urging them to get to the bottom of this. We ALL, Democrats AND Republicans alike, deserve ANSWERS, and THE TRUTH about WHY we were dragged to war on false pretenses. WHY WE WERE LIED TO. WHY THE CONGRESSMAN/WOMAN HIM/HERSELF WAS LIED TO. And what is he/she going to do about it? Hint: They can START by signing John Conyers’ letter and getting fully behind him, if they aren’t there already.

The Powerline boys were on this story the weekend it came out - days before the British elections. Their reasoned analysis (compared to Professor Juan Cole’s hysterical screed) put the kibosh on any idea that the “Bush lied! People died!” bunch would make any headway using the memo as a political club:

It isn’t clear, however, what it was intended to mean. Cole’s implication, and the constant implication of the BUSH LIED! lefties, is that the administration really knew that Saddam didn’t have any WMDs, but fixed the intelligence to make it appear that he did. But we know that isn’t true. The consensus estimate of the U.S. intelligence community has been made public, and it clearly says that, with a high degree of confidence, Iraq possesses chemical and biological weapons. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report has confirmed that this is what the intelligence community believed and reported to the President, and that there is no evidence that the administration improperly influenced the gathering or reporting of intelligence (”The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities.”)

And, whatever the British note-taker meant by the sentence quoted by Cole, he obviously didn’t mean that there was any doubt on the part of British intelligence or Blair’s government that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. On the contrary, the notes specifically refer to Iraq’s WMDs, in sections not quoted by Cole:

And that’s the sticking point for the left. No matter how much they try and shake and bake these minutes, they keep coming up empty handed. To believe that the Administration actually knew there were no WMD’s in Iraq before the war, you have to believe that either the President had no interest in being re-elected or that he actually wanted to lose. Why would any politician worth his salt let his political opponents have a potential election winning issue?

If we went into Iraq knowing full well there were no WMD’s there, logic tells us that this also means the Administration knew we wouldn’t find any WMD’s once the war was over! And since the left gives Karl Rove credit for everything from manipulating Osama Bin Laden to causing earthquake-generating Tsunamis, the idea that “The Architect” would not have thought of the political consequence of being called a liar by the Administration’s political opponents is daffy. To believe otherwise is to think that George Bush deliberately took a course of action that had a pretty good chance of costing him the election. Only the fact that, in the end, the American people didn’t trust John Kerry to protect them from terrorists gave Bush his narrow victory.

So this “new” theme by the left that pre-war intelligence was somehow “fixed” is a yawner even for the MSM. And the left’s excitement that the story might be gaining some traction is a case of pathetic wishful thinking rather than a cause for celebration that the President is about to be laid low.

In fact, the subsequent release of additional memos - 7 in all - about that meeting strongly support the President and Prime Minister’s denial of pre-war intelligence manipulation:

Ironically, the same people arguing that the DSM contains some sort of smoking gun against the Bush administration also claim that this memo supports the same argument. However, when taken together, it becomes apparent that British intelligence could not make up its mind what Bush had in mind for Iraq; it prepared two different memos with mutually-exclusive analsyes. Tony Blair told the Times of London (which published both memos) that the only people who knew what Bush planned were George Bush and Tony Blair, and that the DSM had incorrectly analyzed the situation.

This latest revelation should be called the Emily Litella memo: Never mind.

It’s a telling sign that the left has latched onto the DSMs like a drowning man hanging onto a life preserver. Their attacks on the Administration have been reduced to wishful thinking and daydreaming. And what makes this so puzzling is that there are issues revealed in the memos that they could use as a hammer to bash the President. Clearly, there was a dearth of post-war planning for occupied Iraq, an unconscionable failure of leadership that our military is paying dearly for. The reason that the left won’t highlight this failure, however, is because it’s not an impeachable offense. In their quest to bring the President down, they’re missing a good trick when it comes to old fashioned political bashing.

My prediction is that the MSM will indeed pick up this thread and run with it. The DU’ers and Kossaks won’t be happy about it, but it’s the best they’re going to get.