Overall a very bad week for Democrats

These have not been good times for Democrats.  Consider:

• The nomination of Judge Alito to the Supreme Court

• The flame-out of the Democratic talking points about said judge

• The dry hole left by the Fitzgerald investigation

• The pummeling of Democrats over their racist portrayal of Michael Steele

• The robust state of the US economy

Overall, a very disturbing picture.  Good news is always bad news for the Left.  You can tell, because online hacks like Oliver Willis have been posting up a storm, attempting to obscure defeats with meaningless rhetoric.

So far, the only pathetic response from the Democrats has been Tuesday's stunt by Harry Reid that temporarily forced the Senate into closed session.  Reid's long-winded explanation was that the Senate needed to investigate the intelligence data used by the Bush administration in planning the war in Iraq.

Do the Democrats really want a debate over our Iraqi intelligence? Because such a debate would have to start in the mid-1990's and concentrate heavily on 1998, the year that President Clinton declared:

“The hard fact is that so long as Saddam Hussein remains in power, he threatens the well- being of his people, the peace of his region, the security of the world. The best way to end that threat once and for all is with the new Iraqi government, a government ready to live in peace with its neighbors, a government that respects the rights of its people.

“. . . Heavy as they are, the costs of inaction must be weighed against the price of inaction. If Saddam defies the world and we fail to respond, we will face a far greater threat in the future. Saddam will strike again at his neighbors; he will make war on his own people. And mark my words, he will develop weapons of mass destruction. He will deploy them, and he will use them.” (emphasis added)

The Democratic Party eagerly supported this plan, and steadfastly reminded Americans of Saddam's WMD programs and the grave danger that they posed.  Yesterday, The Anchoress put together a definitive collection of quotes from Clinton administration officials and congressional Democrats that illustrates these beliefs.

Bill Clinton also told Larry King in 2003:

People can quarrel with whether we should have more troops in Afghanistan or internationalize Iraq or whatever, but it is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted for stocks of biological and chemical weapons.

Hearings?  Sure.  Make them public.  Televise them.  Let Republicans question Sandy Berger and Madelyn Allbright and Bill Clinton.  Let them ask where our intelligence data came from.  Let them ask how everyone in the Clinton administration and the Democratic party "knew" that Saddam had a WMD program in 1998.  Put George Tenet on the stand and ask him how the same intelligence could be "truth" when given to Bill Clinton, but "lies" when given to the Bush administration.  Put Joseph Wilson on the stand and make him explain, thoroughly, how his "politics of truth" involved so many misstatements, distortions, and outright fabrications.

Please.  I'm just dying to see it all.

My prediction?  With the Fitzgerald fizzle -- that is, no evidence of criminal activity involving Valerie Plame, Joseph Wilson, the CIA, or the Bush administration at large -- the call for "Bush lied" investigations will burn out just like the Democrat "expose" of Enron that was supposed to happen in 2002.  Why?  Because Enron, like the CIA, peddled its wares equally to Democrats and Republicans.  Nothing would have been more embarrassing for Democrats than to have that infamous photo of Ken Lay and Bill Clinton, smiling and shaking hands, plastered all over the evening news.  And nothing would be more embarrassing today than to have former Clinton administration officials admit, under oath, that seven years ago they propagated the same "lies" that they now accuse George W. Bush of fabricating.
_________________________________________

More:

But should Republicans embark on an investigation of Valerie Plame and her CIA superiors, specifically to determine whether or not she used her husband as a willing accomplice to discredit the Bush administration and possibly throw a presidential election?  Former Senator Zell Miller certainly does.  And so does the Clarice Feldman at the American Thinker.  She writes in part:

Once upon a time, the New York Times and the rest of the American liberal establishment worried about CIA dirty tricks aimed at influencing domestic politics. The more effervescent leftists fulminated about a “secret government” and muttered darkly about a threat to democracy itself, emanating from Langley.

How times (and The Times) have changed! Today, the darlings of the American left and its house organ are a CIA employee and her husband, who set up and implemented a highly irregular operation which, if not explicitly designed to do so, has had the net effect of discrediting an elected leader and his foreign policy. The Wilson Gambit was a stealth operation undertaken outside normal procedures and supervision, used as a political weapon, complete with lies spread by a cooperative media establishment interested in bringing down a leader and his policies which they detest.

It would certainly be worthwhile to have a clear understanding of 1) why Joseph Wilson was only required gave an oral debriefing regarding his trip, instead of filing a written memo, 2) why Joseph Wilson apparently never filed a request for the declassification of his trip before writing his July 2003 New York Times op-ed, and 3) why no one at the CIA asked Robert Novak to remove Valerie Plame's name from his July 2003 article, if in fact she was a covert agent.  Curious questions, all.