… you remember, that’s the program that Harry Reid, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., John D. Rockefeller IV, and Carl Levin have said Saddam didn’t have.  They acknowledge it now by complaining that the declassification of some of the captured documents, so the public can see what was happening there, may be dangerous.  These are documents recovered in Baghdad when US forces first went in.  Making them available does tend to verify and validate the fact that, on this subject, Bush was right, and they were wrong.  And don’t expect to hear them admit that they were wrong and Bush was right either. 

The play is to forget about what was in the documents, and to make an issue over making them public, ignoring the obvious facts contained therein.

They are good at deflection and use it often.  This  deflection is reminiscent of the Kennedy judicial obstruction memo that was read from a shared file on a computer network.  A network that was shared by republicans and democrats in the Senate.  Amazingly, Kennedy (with the help of the media by ignoring the content of the memos) was able to make the issue an issue of ‘how did republicans get his memos,’ instead of what was actually IN those memos.  What was IN those memos was their plan to politicize the Judiciary committee’s work in the handling of Bush’s judicial nominees.

ref: Byron York, Feb, 2004

Sooner or later something will happen that highlights the differences of Democrats and Republicans. The Jim Gibbons episode is one of these events. Ask Jennifer Flowers what Clinton officials/advisers said about her, and how the N.O.W. gang ignored her and her complaint (which Clinton settled out of court over).

When a democrat runs afoul, you see other dems having a pep rally on the capitol steps or (when Clinton was impeached) on the  White House lawn, all lined up in support of their accused politician. And they also denigrate the accuser. I remember James Carville likening Jennifer Flowers as someone who will jump at a dollar bill if you drag it through the trailer park.

Shoe on the other foot. When a republican runs afoul, like Foley, Livingston, and others, the party expects them to pay the price. They don’t get behind the accused, and they don’t bad-mouth the accuser. You don’t hear anyone saying that Gibbons’ accuser, waitress Chrissy Mazzeo, is a gold digger or trailer park trash. And his republican colleagues, while disappointed with the news, say that if the accusations are true then he should go. But there is no pre-judgement of the matter. No pep-rally.

How these parties react to situations like this really does illuminate the character of both.