Smoking wingnuts

Even preznit has given up hope of finding evidence of WMD in Iraq, but others will never, ever give up.

In essence, Hoekstra's gambit reflects a deep-seated conservative belief: that, no matter what the facts say now, history will inevitably vindicate the conservative position. If Negroponte agrees to declassify a torrent of captured documentation, the thinking goes, there must be some pearl for the war supporters within Saddam Hussein's filing cabinets. Members of the Heritage panel of experts--Thomas Joscelyn of the Claremont Institute; Michael Tanji, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer; and Heritage's own Peter Brookes--swear that they're not simply trying to revive Bush's case for invading Iraq, and only want to bring out the full truth. Yet even that may not be enough to get the right to stop suggesting that Bush was correct all along. One audience member, who identified himself as a military officer and former U.S. adviser to the Iraqi foreign ministry in 2003, recounted how he saw rooms full of "fine ashes," presumably the remnants of the information that, had the Baathists not destroyed it, would vindicate Bush's pre-war claims. "Don't hold it personally if you don't find any real smoking gun here," he encouraged the panel, "because the Saddam regime went to very great lengths to see that that didn't happen." Apparently, according to the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, so did the U.S. intelligence community.

I wonder if next Hoekstra and company will next "connect the dots" and realize that the U.S. military would have to be "complicit" with the Intel community in hiding evidence of Saddam's nuclear bombs...and in supporting al Qaeda.