The Washington Post set the left-wing blogosphere aflame with righteous anger on Sunday when an editorial writer dared to question the credibility of brave truth-teller Joseph Wilson, just because he lied to reporters about a few minor details like who sent him on his trip to Niger and what he found there.

If you want to get a sense of how absurd this debate has become, just read this anguished post by “eriposte” at The Left Coaster entitled “A Washington Post Editor Caught Brazenly Lying: When is this going to stop?”:

Obviously, if the the WP editor who wrote this piece of garbage is in favor of Libby’s and Bush’s action, then the only reason to support that action would be to inherently support crookedness and dishonesty. After all, the editor could have asked why Bush did not authorize leaking the part of the NIE that claimed that the uranium claim was “highly dubious”. The fact that the editor did not ask that shows that the person was simply a partisan and dishonest hack who is unfit to be editor of a premier newspaper.

Certainly reasonable people can disagree on whether it was “crooked” and “dishonest” for Bush to declassify parts of the National Intelligence Estimate that supported the belief that Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy uranium to make weapons. But when you take one side of that argument and someone accuses you of “brazenly lying” and asks when are you going to just shut up, that is a sign that you are arguing with an unreasonable person.

Of course, it’s hard to blame “eriposte” when the entire debate over pre-war intelligence has become so unreasonable. The name of the game is to pick out the bits that support your side of the argument and ignore all the bits that support the other side. The left-wing bloggers have denounced the administration for “cherry-picking” the pre-war intel, then turned around and “cherry-picked” a footnote from this one much-discussed NIE in which the State Department’s intelligence service casts doubt on one aspect of the overall case for Iraqi WMDs — well my friends, it doesn’t get more cherry-picked than that.

We’ve got hundreds of thousands marching over illegal immigration. We’ve got a new government struggling to take shape in Iraq. We’ve got a bribery scandal at the nation’s biggest gossip rag, for God’s sake! Yet the blogosphere and the D.C. press would rather engage in a banal, point-scoring debate over the proper procedure for declassifying government documents. It’s time to end this unreasonable, unreasoned discussion and focus on something that matters more, like, I don’t know, Cynthia McKinney’s hair-do.