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BY JAMES TARANTO
Wednesday, November 2, 2005 2:32 p.m. EST
Inside Baseball
With Democrats' efforts to criminalize policy differences over Iraq having failed, they have turned in desperation to politics, led by Harry Reid, the Senate's minority leader. First, over the weekend, Reid demanded the resignation of Karl Rove, the White House's deputy chief of staff. By this logic, Reid also should resign, since he, like Rove, has not been indicted.
Then yesterday, Reid and Sen. Dick Durbin engineered a partisan publicity stunt. The Associated Press describes it:
Democrats forced the Republican-controlled Senate into an unusual closed session Tuesday, questioning intelligence that President Bush used in the run-up to the war in Iraq and accusing Republicans of ignoring the issue.
"They have repeatedly chosen to protect the Republican administration rather than get to the bottom of what happened and why," Democratic leader Harry Reid said. . . .
Democrats sought assurances that Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas would complete the second phase of an investigation of the administration's prewar intelligence.
After about two hours, senators returned to open session having appointed a six-member task force--three members from each party--to review the committee's progress and report back to their respective leaders by Nov. 14.
Democratic senators are transparently playing to the party's moonbat base, who've been taunting them for years demanding that they "stand up" to the Bush administration and who were demoralized when they didn't get the indictment for the war that they wanted for "Fitzmas"--the Angry Left nickname for the day indictments were handed up in the Valerie Plame kerfuffle.
The problem with such base-rallying stunts is that they rally the other side's base too. President Clinton, an advocate of free trade, capital punishment and welfare reform, was never popular with the hard left of the Democratic Party, but they were his most fervent defenders once impeachment was on the table.
President Bush has just had a rough month with his political base; the Harriet Miers misstep brought to the surface disagreements over other matters such as spending and immigration. He repaired much of the damage with the excellent appointment of Sam Alito on Monday, and the Democrats now look to be finishing the job for him.
Republicans should welcome anything that rallies the bases of both parties, for two reasons. First, the Republican base is bigger (see election results, 2004). Second, the Democratic base is totally insane. These people are now, according to the Village Voice, touting Cindy Sheehan for president. Democrats love to mock the Republican base for believing the Bible is true. Democratic basemen believe "Fahrenheit 9/11" is true!
Searchlight's Harry Reid, who backed Iraq's liberation, may not be the brightest bulb on the Fitzmas tree, but surely even he is smart enough that he doesn't believe all this nonsense about how BUSH LIED!!!! Indeed, like John Kerry*, who also knows better, Reid is reduced to incoherence in trying to explain his putative position, as quoted by Fox News: "We know that there were no [weapons of mass destruction] now in Iraq. We didn't know it at the time. We know now that we didn't know at the time that there was no Al Qaeda connection. We know now that we didn't know then that there was no 9/11 connection. We know now that they had no plan for winning the peace. We didn't know that at the time." (Durbin, on the other hand, seems to be a true believer, to judge by his apparently sincere comparison of American soldiers to Nazis.)
Blogger Marshall Wittmann, a McCain Republican turned moderate Democrat, notes that pandering to the tinfoil-hat crowd carries dangers beyond a reinvigorated GOP base:
Will the American people have faith in and trust a party that claims that it was gullibly duped, or as George Romney claimed about another war--that it was "brainwashed"? Moreover, should the objective be re-fighting the reasons to go to war and making the Democrats the official anti-war party or should the goal be achieving reasonable success in Iraq? If you believe in the former than you would encourage more efforts like the one Senate Democrats undertook yesterday. If you believe in the latter, you want the opposition party to present a better plan for winning this war.
While the war is increasingly unpopular, the Democrats should be careful that they are positioning themselves as a party that is gullible, feckless and indecisive on national security.
The Angry Left is right about one thing, though: Democratic politicians are wimps. After all, they won't even stand up to the Angry Left.
* The haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat, who by the way has not been indicted for war crimes in Vietnam.
Deep Cover
Our item yesterday on journalists who knew Valerie Plame was with the CIA before Bob Novak "exposed" her brought a very amusing comment from reader Stephen Wyse:
So everyone knew Valerie worked for the CIA, but no one knew she was a secret agent? Given the increasingly notorious ineffectiveness of our Central "Intelligence" Agency, it's only a matter of time before they start using "CIA analyst" as a cover. "Hi, I'm a CIA analyst and I'm writing an op-ed piece for the Times about weapons of mass destruction. You don't happen to know where there are any, do you?"
On a serious note, check out this report from today's Washington Post:
The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.
The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.
The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.
The existence and locations of the facilities--referred to as "black sites" in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents--are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.
Remember how upset the Angry Left pretended to be about the so-called outing of Plame? The sound you don't hear is their outrage at the Post's exposing something that really is covert and vital to national security...
