Apparently, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid wasn’t paying any attention to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald when he announced the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney’s then-chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby last Friday. As I noted at the time, Mr. Fizgerald stated clearly, “This indictment is not about the war.”
Today, when breaking Senate precedent by calling for a Secret Session under Senate Rule 21 without informing the leadership of the other party (in this case the Senate’s majority party), Reid acted as if Fitzgerald never spoke those words:
The Libby indictment provides a window into what this is really all about, how this administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge its actions.
He must have read a different indictment than I did–indeed, different from the one everyone to the right of moveon.org has read. (Or just read a speech he had written long before the indictment was handed down.)
Paul at Powerline thinks Reid needed this special secret session “to prevent the public from witnessing the spectacle of Democrats making fools out of themselves trying to explain the connection between that indictment and pre-war intelligence on Iraq.” Reid’s antics are nothing more than a stunt, really just a temper tantrum — or perhaps a bone to the party’s left-wing activists — to deflect attention from the president’s rebound in the past few days. And from the failure of the special prosecutor to find what they wanted him to find when he investigated the “leak” of Valerie Plame’s name.
In part, Democrats are still mad that Fizgerald didn’t prove their crazy conspiracy theory about Karl Rove. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts called the Minority Leader’s stunt an “unfortunate event” which resulted in Republicans agreeing “to do what we already agreed to do.”
Democrats aren’t just upset over the non-indictment of Rove and the likelihood of Samuel Alito’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court, they’re furious that the president they revile has once again seized the offensive. They must now be realizing how they failed to take advantage of the president’s late misfortune, his “past two months of much bad news and many missteps.
If Democrats had spent less time staging such media stunts as that today of Senator Reid, spent less time calling the president (& his allies) names, spent less time misrepresenting his record and put more effort into articulating their ideas and putting forward policies to address the problems facing the nation, they might have kept the president on defense. But, as Mr. Reid’s behavior today shows, they’re more interested in political theater than in public policy.
-Dan (AKA GayPatriotWest): GayPatriotWest@aol.com