Open Mike Night on The Hill

Who knew that our honorable lawmakers have the congressional equivalent of "Open Mike Night?" You know, where comedy clubs give amateur comedians 15 minutes to hone their craft.

Turns out congress has the same thing, and a number of Republican congressmen used their 15 minutes of fame to express their fear and horror now that Kerry has tricked them into demanding he release his service records.

I don't know how all of this will turn out, frankly. On good days, I feel certain that the GOP's constant harping on Kerry's views of the war 35 years ago will only serve to remind us of what Dear Leader was doing in those halcyon days.

But on less good days, I fear that this constant "whispering campaign," associating Kerry with Jane Fonda, casting doubts on the severity of the wounds he received in Vietnam, and attacking his postwar statements will have the desired effect and weaken Kerry's obviously superior record. Their tactics worked, after all, against McCain and Max Cleland.

I mean, after all, more than half the country still thinks that there was an Iraq/al Qaeda connection, as the Center for American Progress notes:

"AMERICANS STILL MISLED: The effect of the administration's misleading and, at times, downright false assertions in the leadup to war in Iraq is still reverberating. According to a new PIPA/Knowledge Networks poll, 'a majority of Americans (57%) continue to believe that before the war Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda, including 20% who believe that Iraq was directly involved in the September 11 attacks. Forty-five percent believe that evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda has been found. Sixty percent believe that just before the war Iraq either had weapons of mass destruction (38%) or a major program for developing them (22%).'"

Our only hope is that these types of polls simply show that people who don't have Caller ID are stoopid.