Gay Patriot

When the president commissions a bipartisan investigation into an important matter of policy or law or to study a controversy, reasonable people tend to regard the panel’s conclusions as dispositive of the issue at hand. To be sure, some may question the bias of this or that panelist or the panel’s failure to evaluate certain evidence, but barring such evidence of bias, most will look seriously at the results of the investigation.
Similarly, if the Justice Department brings in a special prosecutor to investigate allegations of criminal behavior, most people expect that his investigation will be thorough. Should the prosecutor find evidence to substantiate such behavior, he will press charges. Without such evidence, he won’t issue indictments. And when the investigation is particularly thorough, people will understand that where no indictment was issued, the prosecutor didn’t find enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonble doubt that a crime had occurred.
As Democrats’ hatred of President Bush increased, they have called for no end to investigations of his Administration. They claimed they wanted to find out the truth. But, when those investigations, be they criminal or informational, reach conclusions with which they disagree, instead of finding such conclusions dispositive, they call for still more investigations. Or, as Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid did on Tuesday, misrepresent the findings of an investigation to suit their ends.
Like so many Democrats (and others on the Left), Mr. Reid holds that Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation proves something which Mr. Fitzgerald says the investigation didn’t even address. Given that many on the Left found (to borrow the words of one of my most persistent critics) that “Mr. Fitzgerald handled himself so incredibly well,” they should take him at his word that, “This indictment is not about the war.” But, that statement is at odds with the result they wanted his investigation to yield–evidence that the White House twisted intelligence in order to make the case for war.
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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