To pile on Jonah’s observations, I have a column today on the Democrats’ effort to trump a scandal up from the perfectly obvious fact that the CIA has been brainstorming about how to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda figures.

What I didn’t know while I was writing the column is that the story has already been mortally undermined by Gen. Michael Hayden, the former CIA director. General Hayden has explained to NPR that while he led the agency (for two years from 2006 through the end of the Bush administration) neither Vice President Cheney nor anyone else directed him not to brief Congress about the sketchy covert program directed at al-Qaeda leaders. This contradicts the silly NYTimes report that caused all this weekend’s hullabaloo.