Harry Reid's tantrum the other day certainly reads like a bill of particulars in the court of public opinion:
The manipulation of intelligence, to sell the war in Iraq, Vice President Cheney is involved in that. The White House energy policy, that puts Big Oil ahead of the American consumer, Vice President Cheney is behind that. Leaking classified information to discredit White House critics, the Vice President is behind that. Halliburton, contracting abuse, the list goes on and it goes on. Certainly America can do better than that.
Leave aside that there's not a single sentence that's not demonstrably false. It doesn't matter. The Democratic Party is now attempting to create a series of unchallengable orthodoxies in the public mind. Iraq was a mistake, if not a moral obscenity. The war was conducted for Big Oil, and at the behest of corporate slavemasters. The Bush administration, having not found either hidden underground terrorist enclaves, and not found WMD, clearly told untruths during the runup to the war. Therefore, BUSH LIED about those things. What's that you say? We saw the same intelligence and came to the same conclusions? Well, then, Bush, er Cheney, must have manipulated the intelligence. From there, it's a short step to simply having lied us into war.
There's no question that the Democrats seek to fan a general discontent into a general rage. That this strategy will forfeit Iraq and make action against actual enemies like Iran, Syria, and North Korea all but impossible is beside the point.
Whether or not it comes to actual impeachment, the Democrats seem to think it's 1973 all over again. They can attack and either remove or neuter a Vice President (although it was easier then, since they had Agnew's fingerprints on the money envelopes), and then reduce a President to impotence or remove him. Then, as now, allies of good faith will be abandoned to barbarians. Then, as now, the Party has no strategy to confront an existential threat to the country.
Should they gain power in 2008, that will all too tragically obvious.
