E Pluribus Unum

by Mark Adams

From the Department of Like-That-Matters:  conservative author, columnist and White House correspondent for NRO, Byron York begins laying the foundation for discrediting the Senate Intelligence Committee's long, long overdue "Phase Two" report on its investigation into pre-war handling of intelligence.

Not to be confused with "Phase One, in which Doris gets her oats."  This part concerns what the administration knew, and how did they lie about it.  Not surprising that the Republican chair of the committee, Pat Roberts, has stalled this important work, again, this time in an effort to try and make Democratic lawmakers share the blame for this fiasco of a war and look as duplicitous as Bush Administration officials.  Roberts insists that the Democrat's pre-war statements be examined in the same light as those who had the complete, unedited, non-cherry-picked version of the available intelligence -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Powell and Feith -- especially Feith and his office of Special Plans.

Certainly most of the public should see right through the charade, blaming Democrats for the hold up.  Everyone except the few remaining Bush apologists left peeking out of their bunkers know all too well that it just doesn't matter what Ted Kennedy said about Iraq's nuclear ambitions and capabilities.  What mattered was the President and his war cabinet trying to scare us into believing that Saddam Hussein was trying to put nuclear weapons in Osama bin Laden's hands.

But that won't stop Roberts.  His mission is damage control, not fact-finding.

York, however, goes one step beyond Roberts in his attempt to prime the well of distraction by reminding his Bush-Bot audience that the GOP may not only have disloyal defectors in their midsts,

Republican lawmakers have lost effective control because two of their own, Senators Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia Snowe of Maine, sometimes side with Democrats.

...but also a mole:

Eric Rosenbach, hired by Sen. Hagel to work on prewar intelligence issues, came to the Senate after completing studies at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government under Rand Beers, a top foreign-policy adviser for Kerry. In Fall 2004, Rosenbach took three weeks to volunteer for the Kerry campaign in York County, Pennsylvania.

Gotta love this.  Without hesitation, York characterizes Rosenbach as "a key Republican committee staffer" who committed the cardinal sin of being a "veteran" of the Kerry campaign.

No doubt this will escalate into a full fledged corruption probe and hatchet job against this poor kid.  For all we or York knows, he was crucial only in cutting the crust of John Kerry's peanut butter sandwiches and taking out the garbage for three lousy weeks of volunteering in the campaign so he could get some real-world experience to apply towards his political science studies.

Lovely.

The article takes the mundane fact that while working on his masters degree, Rosenbach took a class taught by Beers and that evil traitor, ex-counter terrorism chief Richard Clarke, then got some brownie points holding Beers' briefcase for a few weeks -- unpaid -- as did many other fortunate sons in the right place at the right time; and not so subtly implies that he's part of the vast left-wing conspiracy that has hypnotized Chuck Hagel into apostacy.

(Hat Tip:  Maha)

UPDATE:  I found this piece which informs us that the the investigation of Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans is being nicely set up to fail, scrubbed clean by an experienced team of whitewashers.