Angry Left Plays Fantasy Politics

Q: What do the following events have in common?

1. Harry Reid breaks with Senate traditions to call the chamber into closed session to discuss the investigation of pre-war intelligence on Iraq.
2. A student organization at Cincinnati's Walnut Hills High School plans a walkout during their final class period today to protest the Iraq War. The protest is timed to coincide with protests going on nationally.

A: They are examples of the Angry Left's orchestrated attempt to nationalize its echo chamber.

The Angry Left's echo chamber has been listening to its slogan, "Bush lied!" since well before the Iraq war began. But no one else has. With the indictment of Scooter Libby, they think they have their chance to reveal to America the Awful Truth that only they have known for so long.

So here's the deal: the folks who complained that it was Bush's fault that most Americans thought that Saddam was responsible for 9-11 now want most Americans to believe that Scooter was indicted for lying about WMD in Iraq, and that all that keeps the Evil Genius Karl Rove, Despotic Oil Baron Dick Cheney and other members of the administration from being indicted, including the Useful Idiot President himself, is the Republican spin machine that keeps Bush's popularity above zero.

Naturally, that means that the Angry Left now turns up its own spin machine to hypercentrifugal mega-revolution.

So Reid gets on CNN to tell America that behind Scooter's inability to remember how exactly he learned that Joe Wilson needed a job and his wife got him one is a massive conspiracy to cover up the deliberate falsification of intelligence data by Rove, Cheney, et al. Here's what Reid actually said, per ABC News:

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.

And the foot-soldiers of the left (apologies to all actual soldiers for that metaphor) step out to do their sixties nostalgia act on Blair Circle behind WHHS.

The timing is not a coincidence. Someone with a big check from George Soros is using Howard Dean's mailing list to get all this going at once.

But here's the deal. No one will notice or care.

First, most Americans are probably smart enough to know that the intelligence was flawed, not that anyone deliberately misrepresented it. Yes, before the war there was an ongoing discussion of the value and significance of lots of intelligence data, and now there's concern that the intelligence apparatus was (and remains) inadequate. But folks outside the echo chamber know the difference between mistakes and lies.

Second, most Americans aren't nostalgic for the sixties and seventies. They aren't impressed by things that look like Vietnam War protests or Watergate investigations (noted previously as the only two stories that the left's MSM can tell). They're even less impressed when the protesters are a few kids from Hyde Park willing to risk a detention and maybe a point on their GPA for the chance to list on their applications to Brown University that they participated in anti-war protests.

Third, they know that this doesn't make one whit of difference to the present. Bush can't run again, and we can't cut and run from Iraq.

Fourth, even if they listen, they'll simply notice again that the left is out of ideas. Maybe the right is too far right. Maybe the right is stupid. But the left is clueless, and the right has the virtue of ideas which, while imperfect, have yielded some significant stuff in the last twenty years (see fall of communism, spread of democracy, steady and growing global prosperity).

Finally, nobody except Vanity Fair subscribers cares about publicity hounds Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame. America still cares more about Brad and Jen.