If you haven’t been watching Conyer’s hearing on C-SPAN3, you’ll want to find a replay of it at some point. It is like a parallel world where the truth is spoken, pollsters and consultants are ignored, and no one hesitates to say that the President and his whole national security apparatus should be frog-marched into Leavenworth prison.

Of course, those of us that have been following the Downing Street Minutes flap know that the President has committed high crimes. The Washington Post can go fuck themselves.

The Washington Post wrote this lead editorial which says that these memos were not given much play in the press because:

“They do not add a single fact to what was previously known about the administration’s pre-war deliberations.”

The New York Times can go fuck themselves. They tried this pathetic justification:

My checks find no basis for Ms. Lowe’s concern about censorship or undue outside pressures. Rather, it appears that key editors simply were slow to recognize that the minutes of a high-powered meeting on a life-and-death issue — their authenticity undisputed — probably needed to be assessed in some fashion for readers. Even if the editors decided it was old news that Mr. Bush had decided in July 2002 to attack Iraq or that the minutes didn’t provide solid evidence that the administration was manipulating intelligence, I think Times readers deserved to know that earlier than today’s article.

This is all a charade. There were no drones, no scuds, no uranium, no connections to al-Qaeda, no potential for a mushroom cloud, no immanent threat, no conceivable legal pretense…

Clinton may have exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam in order to justify the continuance of our containment policy. But, he never fed an already traumatized public a steady diet of terror warnings, he never told them to buy duct tape, he never spent 300 billion dollars of their money to launch a preemptive war, he never sent Ms. Albright before the United Nations to give an intelligence assessment that was totally at odds with our intelligence community’s real intelligence assessment.

High crimes? In Conyer’s hearing room, no one is embarrassed to say it.