The "dumb" Mr. Bush?

Are Democrats stampeding into an ambush?

Former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force Jack Kelly, (also former Green Beret, and national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) delivers the following warning:

….Democrats can dig themselves into a deep hole if they make extravagant antiwar and anti-Bush statements now that prove false later.

Federal Appeals Court Judge Gilbert Merritt is one of 13 experts the Justice Department sent to Iraq to rebuild the judicial system there. Judge Merritt (a Democrat) wrote in the Nashville Tennessean on June 25 that he has seen a document, allegedly written by Saddam's son Uday that proves that an intelligence officer assigned to the Iraqi embassy in Pakistan was "responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group."

Former Navy Secretary John Lehman is heading the congressional commission investigating September 11. Mr. Lehman has told reporters that classified information he has seen indicates Iraq trained al Qaeda operatives in how to prepare and deliver anthrax.

Al Jazeera reporter Hamid Mir says he has "personal knowledge" of an attempt by an Iraqi intelligence operative to contact bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1998, former Clinton administration official Jessica Stern writes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs.

Both the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a retired Air Force general have hinted that the Bush administration has more evidence about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction than it is letting on.

When might Mr. Bush make such information public? Perhaps when Democrats have gone too far out onto the antiwar limb to crawl back. Democrats may be racing into an ambush that Mr. Bush will spring at a time of his choosing.

If so, then the Democrats (and the left in general) have seriously underestimated a popular Republican president.

It wouldn't be the first time.

If Mr. Kelly's warning doesn't quite jumpstart your political imagination, consider it in the context of this intriguing report about the French origins of the (allegedly) forged intelligence about Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium from Niger:

the president’s accusers may soon have to eat their words. A growing number of sources demonstrate President Bush’s words were accurate and based on intelligence that originated . . . with the French.

Who is really being ambushed? Maybe the Democrats could ask this guy.

(As to long term political fallout, is this merely a tar baby? Or might it be more on the level of mass extinction?)