Wishin' and Hopin' and Thinkin' and Prayin' for WMDs

Led by Rick Santorum, who once tied for the stupidest Senator (and was third for Biggest Windbag) in a vote of staffers, desperate elected Republicans have started claiming that WMDs really have been found, but that the Administration refuses to put out the Good News.

The right wing blogosphere has long excoriated the Bush Administration for failing to translate and release all of the documents that have been found in Iraq purportedly showing WMDs to have really existed. Try not to laugh when I tell you that they accuse this administration, famous for plastic turkeys and phony "turning points," of sitting on the news that there really were WMDs.

This nonsense remerged from the imaginary world of Instapundit and Pajamas Media yesterday as Senator Santorum and Rep. Peter Hoekstra decided that it was time to make a speech that WMDs really had been found, so it really was worth losing 2500 Americans after all. The only problem is that the weapons are from the Iran-Iraq war, would not work is you jumped on them and have nothing to do with the putative post 1991 weapons program the neo-cons used as an excuse for this debacle.

Santorum's folly brought out the wing-nuts in all their glory. Instapundit proclaims that turning WMDs "into a keystone of the war debate ... may turn out to have been a mistake for war opponents." Roger L. Simon, Hugh Hewitt and Austin Bay are all also happy to awaken their dormant position that WMDs were there after all.

Stephen Elliott is correct that it is good to see a realization that WMDs really were the stated reason for the war and its only possible justification in the eyes of many. But the real fun is that they are turning on their own. Even Santorum realizes that a few old buried chemical weapons cannot possibly justify the war, so he complains that things aren't being declassified quickly enough. (Apparently, the only things that should not be declassified are those that expose the theft of our civil liberties.) The refrain is happily taken up by the likes of Powerline, where their punk spiritual leader, Michael Leeden, is quoted:

"Please point out to your readers that Negroponte only declassified a few fragments of a much bigger document. Read the press conference and you will see that Santorum and Hoekstra were furious at the meager declassification. They will push for more, and we all must do that. I am told that there is a lot more in the full document, which CIA is desperate to protect, since it shows the miserable job they did looking for WMDs in Iraq."

So let me get this straight. The right wing party line is that the White House is refusing to declassify information that would embarrass the CIA. the same White House that was so negative about the CIA that it developed its own intelligence capability. Meanwhile, the CIA, which the White House is protecting, actually is undermining the White House.

That makes sense.

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