Could've been the whiskey, might've been the gin

Look at the mess they're in.

Over at The Mudville Gazette, Greyhawk has an excellent post with snippets of news accounts detailing the Advanced State of Decayness in the Democratic Party. Here are some of the clips Greyhawk has linked to.

The New York Times

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said on "Meet the Press" on NBC that Karl Rove, the senior presidential adviser, "should leave" the White House because he was found to have had discussions with reporters about the C.I.A. operative, Valerie Wilson.

The Washington Times

Most anger at the Pentagon is directed at Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Mr. Levin has been conducting an investigation into Iraq prewar intelligence assessments at the Pentagon. He has requested reams of confidential documents, some of which the Pentagon says do not exist.

In what one official calls "extortion," Mr. Levin has pressured the Pentagon by blocking the nominations of former Ambassador Eric Edelman to be undersecretary of policy and Peter Flory to be his top deputy on European security matters. As the impasse hardened, Mr. Bush resorted to recess appointments.

The Washington Post

"We were so stupid that we let our idiot president and an Arab con man fool us on a life-and-death issue."

As a campaign theme for elections in 2006 and 2008, that proposition may lack a little something. Yet Democrats who supported the invasion of Iraq but now cannot support the consequences of their vote are flirting with it. To them, good night, and good luck.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

The Democratic party appears to have finally come up with a way to explain why so many of its elected leaders gave President Bush the authority to wage war in Iraq.

Three simple words: "We were duped."

A parade of top Democrats have contended in recent days that they would have been antiwar in 2002 had they known then what they now believe to be true: that the Bush administration manipulated the intelligence in order to build a bogus case for war. In pursuit of that theme, Senate Democrats on Tuesday successfully demanded that their GOP colleagues quit stalling and finish a long-promised investigation that could determine whether the war planners were dishonest.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The president went on television to announce: "Earlier today, I ordered America's armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq. Their mission is to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors."

"There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years," the vice chairman of the Intelligence committee told the Senate.

The president was Bill Clinton (Dec. 16, 1998). The senator was Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat from West Virginia (Oct. 10, 2002).

Isn't that a Party.