Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Kerry's dark and stormy night theme

Wesley Pruden:

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The panic among the Democrats, yearning to reprise Ronald Reagan's "morning in America" campaign but saddled with a candidate and his theme of "dark and stormy night in America," is plain to see. There's a natural temptation to ascribe political motives to the whitewashers, but we mustn't do that.
Nevertheless, Monsieur Kerry and the acolytes, in their eagerness to tar George W. Bush with everything black and sticky, are determined to establish as settled fact the notion that Saddam was innocent of complicity in September 11, and thus taking the war to Iraq was either unjustified, or criminal, or both. There's a heap of difference between "no credible evidence" and "no evidence," as any district attorney and defense lawyer would tell you, and any hack can build a headline and even a front-page story on flimsier stuff than you can build a criminal case on.
When Dick Cheney blew the whistle, noting that the commission report went far beyond such evidence as the commission could find, the two chairmen of the commission, Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, couldn't disavow the sloppiness of the staff work fast enough. "Were there contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq," asked Mr. Kean, a Republican. "Yes ... no question." Said Mr. Hamilton, a Democrat: "The vice president is saying, I think, that there were connections [between Saddam and bin Laden] ... we don't disagree with that." There was just "no credible evidence" of Iraqi cooperation in the planning and execution of the September 11 attacks on America. Neither George W. nor Dick Cheney ever said there was, but this was either lost or ignored in the inside-the-Beltway hysteria following the release of the commission's early findings.
The commission obviously needs help in getting to the bottom of things, because pesky facts are struggling to be recognized. John Lehman, the secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and a member of the commission, told television interviewers Sunday that a lieutenant colonel in Saddam's Fedayeen, one Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, was actually a prominent member of al Qaeda who has been identified in published accounts as having attended a meeting in Malaysia to plot the September 11 attacks. So did two of the September 11 hijackers, as well as senior al Qaeda members. It's a shame that the commission and its staff of crack investigators don't have time to read the newspapers. This was all laid out in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal on May 27.