In taking out the Dana Milbank/Walter Pincus article from Saturday’s Washington Post (and a great deal of this endless, endless hand-wringing over pre-war intelligence), Christopher Hitchens says all that needs to be said about the Post, the Democrats and Chris Matthews:

But then there is the really superb pedantry and literal-mindedness on which the remainder of the case depends. This achieved something close to an apotheosis on the front page of the Washington Post on Nov. 12, where Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus brought complete gravity to bear. Is it true, as the president claimed in his Veterans Day speech, that Congress saw the same intelligence sources before the war, and is it true that independent commissions have concluded that there was no willful misrepresentation? Top form was reached on the inside page:But in trying to set the record straight, [Bush] asserted: “When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Congress approved it with strong bipartisan support.” The October 2002 joint resolution authorized the use of force in Iraq, but it did not directly mention the removal of Hussein from power.A prize, then, for investigative courage, to Milbank and Pincus. They have identified the same problem, though this time upside down, as that which arose from the passage of the Iraq Liberation Act, during the Clinton-Gore administration, in 1998. That legislation