Looking For A Brassy Noel

As a political junkie and blog addict, it's often hard to put on my Everyman hat and remember that the news stories the general public is seeing are not the same as the ones that we're seeing, nor are they necessarily interpreting them in the same way.

However, with the latest frantic hysteria over the weekend, with Rep. Murtha's great speech at the center (increasingly stepped-up dissent-is-treason/cowardice rhetoric and attempts to weasel out of it after the fact; the sham withdrawal resolution; another indictment looming on the horizon), it looks like the Republicans are becoming increasingly desperate. It feels to me like things are about to come to a head, that all but the most diehard true believers are on the verge of realizing just how horribly this country has gone astray under Republican rule.

It would be interesting to see just how much damage such a realization would do to the Republican party in the short-term and long-term, as well as to the corporate media and right-wing pundits who serve as the Republicans' censors and memory-scrubbers. Also, what happens if the Republicans' last hurrah is to get Alito or someone similar confirmed to the Supreme Court? What happens if we have a Democratic executive and legislature, but a resolutely Republican judiciary? Will the Democrats be able to use the Republicans' "judicial activism" rhetoric against them when the courts start striking down Democratic legislation?

But I digress a bit from my intended point, which is to ask the question: As more and more revelations about dodgy intelligence surface (Curveball, al-Libi, discrepancies between the intelligence the administration saw vs. the intelligence they showed Congress), why haven't the Downing Street Memos made a comeback? Maybe I've just missed it, but I haven't seen a single post about them since midyear, when the Big Brass Alliance was hammering away at them relentlessly. I think they usefully crystallize what this country is just now learning, that the intelligence was "fixed around the policy," and that it was a nudge-nudge-wink-wink open secret. The memos reinforce the more recent evidence of fixed intelligence and vice versa, and I think we should start reminding people about them again.

Thanks to my coworker who put this idea in my head, and wants to see the Democrats rub the Republicans' noses in it every time they prattle about how "the Democrats saw the same intelligence and drew the same conclusions."