Dems: Surreal Unseriousness

Daniel Henninger puts forward the case that the Democrats are trying to beat something with nothing: Huge NYT flame-out headlines misrepresenting the NIE memorandum, par exemple. Here are his own words.

The Democrats are back in the national-security game alright, but the playbook is opinion polling first, with belief a second option. One result is their national-security offensive has taken on a surreal unseriousness.

A fortnight ago, the big political story suddenly became ABC's made-for-television movie, "The Path to 9/11." Out of the woods to dominate the news cycle came the ghosts from the Clinton past--Sandy Berger, Madeleine Albright--condemning the film as a slander on their long years before the antiterror mast. Up to this point, Democratic candidates had seemed to be surfing smoothly toward control of the House on waves of bad media news out of Iraq. Suddenly they've got to deal with a movie suggesting we're in Iraq because their president failed to pull the trigger on Osama bin Laden.

This sideshow culminated last Sunday morning in a bizarre exchange between Bill Clinton and Chris Wallace of Fox--Mr. Clinton wagging a familiar finger at Mr. Wallace and accusing the anchorman of smirking at him. Personally, I think Mr. Wallace generally looks bemused, which is a distant, more innocent cousin of the smirk. Bill O'Reilly, now there's a big-league smirk.

Some pundits surmised that the Clinton eruption was planned to rally the liberal base, depressed at the sight of bad Bush's approval rating crawling back above 40%, and rising. This was Bill Clinton so my guess is it was both--planned and over the top. The fact is, the Democrats found themselves back in Afghanistan with Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright, rather than where they wanted the news to be, amid Baghdad's bombs. A messy week.

Then came the leaked NIE story in the New York Times this past Sunday. What a bombshell. This would put them back on message: Iraq as failure. But by now it's evident that the whole workweek invested in the National Intelligence Estimate story was a colossal waste of the time devoted to it. What began Sunday as the Times's towering bonfire--16 intel agencies and 12 anonymous sources writing off Iraq--by Wednesday had burned down to embers.

After the White House released the NIE summary late Tuesday afternoon, reporters reading it for the first time on the Web undoubtedly kept hitting the Page Down button on their PCs. This is it!? Three crummy pages that anyone could have boiled down from a Foreign Affairs "Wither Iraq?" symposium.

Now I notice that the blogo-nut-roots are attacking Mark Foley in our county for an allegedly salacious e-mail, which turns out on examination to be just normal questions for a politician who likes people rather than humanity. The over-anxious 16-year old might be just another self-absorbed south Florida mess for reading some sort of inappropriate motives into the pol's friendly prose.

But you can bet that the slurs will hit the MSM, an outlier of the Dem-dumbs and moral relativists who believe the end of defeating Repubs justifies any means, even lies and insinuations that ruin reputations. Henninger finishes up:

The Democrats' problem is this: They are trying to beat policy with politics and weaken belief with polls. This may work for Social Security. I don't think it works with war. Don't be surprised if come November, Democrats are still on message--Iraq as failure--and still in the minority.

And now a flurry of NYT agitprop summons up the nasty masses with stories that the Dems are way ahead instead of almost neck and neck. That ought to scare any decent citizens in this country to the polls to whack down the defeatists and appeasers before they make free speech hate speech---depending on which party you support.