This news conference and the report are nothing more than buttcoverings for the Senate. They are creating cover for their own re-election efforts and to heck with the admin or the nation.
But Fox News Channel's Tony Snow had a different idea. Snow thought it might be interesting to stick to the facts for a change.
This Sunday past, Sen. Rockefeller took a play from the Terry McAuliffe playbook and simply invented a convenient history. He told Snow and a national television audience that President Bush has alarmed the nation with a speech warning that an attack from Iraq was imminent.
Snow coolly played a tape of the president's State of the Union speech where he in fact said exactly the opposite. Bush warned the Congress that the United States could not wait for a threat to become imminent, to appear suddenly and without warning.
Snow then read from a speech that Rockefeller himself had given, one in which the West Virginia Democrat had proclaimed the threat from Iraq to be imminent.
Sen. Rockefeller was exposed and embarrassed and babbled on incoherently about what an average American should have inferred from the president's speech. I think he was close to proclaiming psychic powers when the interview – mercifully for him – ended.
Finally, a Democratic critic of the president had been obliged to confront the facts. It doesn't happen too often. On the same day, Slow Joe Biden was allowed by Tim Russert to repeatedly dodge the hard questions such as why he had voted for the war in Iraq if it seemed like a bad idea to him now. Few can filibuster like Joe, however, and Russert didn't corner him.