A quick look at Memeorandum is usually a good way to tell whether a big story is helping Republicans or Democrats. In general, if it benefits Republicans, the story is boosted up the rankings by conservative bloggers, with just a few liberal ones linking to criticize it, and vice versa if the story helps Democrats. In the first few hours after the NYT posted its scoop about the Iraqi nuclear documents that were posted online, the buzz on Memeorandum was pretty evenly split. But as of this morning it’s dominated by conservative voices.

I’ve already mentioned Jim Geraghty’s widely linked post, but in addition to that, Ed Morrissey’s post about all the other Iraqi documents that the media have been ignoring is getting a lot of well-deserved attention. The Anchoress has a brilliant spoof of the NYT’s editorial process. And Glenn Reynolds reminds us all what a joke the “containment” strategy turned out to be once we discovered the rotten core of the “oil for food” program.

Those are just a few of the ways in which the NYT’s scoop is inadvertently reminding people why we invaded Iraq and destroyed Saddam’s regime. If we hadn’t, we would have three crazy dictators on the verge of possessing or actually possessing nukes, and Saddam — with his hatred of the United States and history of aggression — would have been inarguably the most dangerous of the three.