This really is a horrible time to be a Democrat. Flummoxed at every turn by both the dumb good luck of George Bush and the powerful forces of history at work in the Middle East, the Democrats have been reduced to sitting around trying to think up ways to get attention:

A Senate Minority Leadership staffer says this plan to shut down the Senate was hatched last night, as staff and Democratic Senators looked over the wreckage of what they believed was going to be their finest few days in a long time: an indictment of a White House official, a struggling President, a conservative judicial nominee, a splintering conservative base.

“Alito’s nomination and the press that followed just devastated them,” says the leadership source. “They couldn’t get their message out. They felt that things had pivoted on them, and that with the President presenting his plan for avian flu, with the Alito nomination going apparently well, with the tax panel recommendations, they were going to get ploughed under. This was a stunt. But it worked.”

The stink of desperation on the Democratic side of the aisle is almost palpable. Instead of the avalanche of indictments emanating from the Special Prosecutors 2 year investigation of L’Affaire d’Plame which could have included The Evil One Karl Rove and perhaps (in their wettest of wet dreams) Vice President Cheney, all they got for Fitzmas was Scooter Libby and two front teeth, knocked out by the Special Prosecutor who chastised them thusly for trying to make the entire prosecution about their flights of fancy regarding intelligence before the war:

“This indictment is not about the war. This indictment’s not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel…”

Since no one on the pro-war side could possibly see any vindication regarding their position on the lead up to the conflict even if no one had been indicted, Fitzgerald’s caustic comments could only be directed toward the Democrats and their steadfast adherence to conspiracy theories about how and why we went to war.

Imagine the effort by the Democrats that went into planning the media campaign which would have followed the Special Prosecutors parade of wrongdoers being frog-marched in handcuffs to the hoosegow. Speeches, talking points, photo-ops, surrogates being booked on all the cable shows, not to mention the activation of the rabid, frothing-at-the-mouth base that would have been in the streets demanding the resignation of Bush, Cheney, and Rove et. al. It must have taken hundreds of man hours to plan and coordinate such an operation.

Alas, it was not to be. And to top it off, George Bush goes and names a conservative judge whose credentials are so impeccable that even some liberal lawyers are praising the choice. The right is sated and united once again and Bush, although considerably weakened by the Miers fiasco, gives a wink and a nod in the direction of the Special Prosecutor and goes about planning his trip to Latin America next week.

So what was supposed to be the story of the year, one that should have dominated the headlines and cable shows for weeks, instead ends up being a two day wonder that no amount of flogging by partisans can resurrect. But never let it be said that Majority Leader Harry Reid didn’t try. I can just see the lot of them, the Democratic leadership, sitting around glumly when all of a sudden, Harry Reid jumps to his feet and suggests that maybe they should go ahead with the media campaign as if Fitzgerald did in fact indict Rove, Cheney, the President’s dog and the White House chef. They could pretend that all their dreams had come true. Call on Rove to resign! Ask the President to “apologize to the American people!” And best of all, pretend for the umpteenth time that we are unaware of the fact that pre-war intel on Saddam’s WMD was not “twisted.”

And item number one on the to do list was to invoke Rule 21 and place the Senate in closed session. Whenever Democrats pull stunts like this, they remind me of 12 year old drama queens. In fact, there is much in the Democratic party that could be compared to a clique of little girls; they’re always jabbering about nothing, they value form over substance, and they don’t realize they should grow up and start acting like adults.

It appears that this tactic did in fact, not “work” quite as well as the Democratic staffer so wishfully uttered above. In fact, as the Powerline boys point out, if they want a debate about pre-war intel on the Iraq war, bring it on:

There is a great deal to be said on this subject, and most of it is already in the public domain. The fact is that the intelligence agencies’ official consensus estimate expressed a high level of confidence that Saddam possessed both chemical and biological weapons. The U.N. didn’t disagree, contrary to popular assumptions and Hans Blix’s revisionist history. As we have noted here before, the U.N.’s UNMOVIC reports emphasized the large quantities of banned materials for which Iraq had failed to account.

This is a big topic, as is the subject of Iraq’s many connections with al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. In my opinion, we should take up the Democrats’ challenge: most Americans know all too little about the threats posed by Saddam’s Iraq. Let’s talk about those threats from now until November 2006.

And as Max Boot pointed out in his LA Times piece yesterday, such a debate would unmask the real liar in the Plamegate matter – Joseph Wilson:

Making the best of a weak hand, Democrats argued that the case was not about petty-ante perjury but, as Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid put it, “about how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to challenge the president.” The problem here is that the one undisputed liar in this whole sordid affair doesn’t work for the administration. In his attempts to turn his wife into an antiwar martyr, Joseph C. Wilson IV has retailed more whoppers than Burger King.

Even Administration critics like former aide to Secretary of State Powell Lawrence Wilkerson acknowledge that the pre-war intel was wrong but not “twisted”:

…I can’t tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can’t. I’ve wrestled with it. I don’t know – and people say, well, INR dissented. That’s a bunch of bull. INR (the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research) dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That’s all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios….

A losing strategy on the indictments. A losing strategy on scapegoating the Bush Administration on pre war intel. An apparent losing strategy on the Alito nomination as some of the more moderate Democrats like Ben Nelson are jumping ship and are refusing to back a Moveon-mandated filibuster.

Harry Reid is responsible for all of this. He has proven himself even dumber than his counterpart in the House Nancy Pelosi who also suffers from hoof in mouth disease but at least has the good fortune to have been born with breasts which immunizes her from most criticism in the party.

No such luck for Harry. The problem the Democrats have is that when you scan the list of potential replacements for Reid, you get the depressing feeling that you may be better off opening to any page in the DC Metro phone book, closing your eyes, and stabbing the page with your finger in order to choose the next Minority Leader. With the Democrats luck, they’d probably hit on one of the 2 dozen or so Republicans listed.

So the Democrats are stuck with Harry Reid for the foreseeablee future. I suspect after another electoral disaster in 2006, that the party will give Harry a gold watch, a pat on the back for a job well done, and send him off into the sunset. Who they’ll get to replace him is anyone’s guess. There’s always that phone book…