Tuesday, November 01, 2005
Shark Attack
What Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid did this afternoon--forcing the Senate into closed session to consider the bogus intelligence used to sell the Iraq war--was a very big deal. For one thing, it's only happened about 50 times in the last 75 years or so, and not since 1997. But that's trivia. What matters is the substance of it, the way it puts Plamegate, pushed off the front burner by the Alito nomination, back on to boil. Plus, it made Bill "Formerly Your 2008 Republican Nominee" Frist whine like a little girl, too.
The Democrats' talking points on the move, while not especially new to anybody opposed to the war and the way it was sold, contain especially one notable point: the senators said that many of them voted to go to war on the basis of what turned out to be intelligence that the White House provided with the intent of deceiving them. This is as close to a chorus of "We was wrong" as we've yet heard from the 44 Senate Democrats, and it comes at a moment when Mr. and Mrs. Support-the-President-in-Wartime might be ready to think that well, yeah, maybe they weren't telling the truth about the war after all. Mark Schmitt at TPM Cafe thinks Reid's move might represent the moment at which the Repugs lose control of the agenda in the Senate for good and all, and says it might have repercussions when it comes time to vote on Alito and/or the nuclear option.
I watched Reid for a few minutes on one of the Sunday news shows last weekend. He's got that mild-mannered, grandfatherly look, that soft speaking voice--but he's shown in the past, and again today, that he's a shark. And you know what sharks do when there's blood in the water.
What Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid did this afternoon--forcing the Senate into closed session to consider the bogus intelligence used to sell the Iraq war--was a very big deal. For one thing, it's only happened about 50 times in the last 75 years or so, and not since 1997. But that's trivia. What matters is the substance of it, the way it puts Plamegate, pushed off the front burner by the Alito nomination, back on to boil. Plus, it made Bill "Formerly Your 2008 Republican Nominee" Frist whine like a little girl, too.
The Democrats' talking points on the move, while not especially new to anybody opposed to the war and the way it was sold, contain especially one notable point: the senators said that many of them voted to go to war on the basis of what turned out to be intelligence that the White House provided with the intent of deceiving them. This is as close to a chorus of "We was wrong" as we've yet heard from the 44 Senate Democrats, and it comes at a moment when Mr. and Mrs. Support-the-President-in-Wartime might be ready to think that well, yeah, maybe they weren't telling the truth about the war after all. Mark Schmitt at TPM Cafe thinks Reid's move might represent the moment at which the Repugs lose control of the agenda in the Senate for good and all, and says it might have repercussions when it comes time to vote on Alito and/or the nuclear option.
I watched Reid for a few minutes on one of the Sunday news shows last weekend. He's got that mild-mannered, grandfatherly look, that soft speaking voice--but he's shown in the past, and again today, that he's a shark. And you know what sharks do when there's blood in the water.
