Representative Chris Carney

As I noted last week, my friend Chris Carney was elected to Congress as a Democrat last week. There is a Los Angeles Times' story today on the central irony of his election. My former colleagues at the Pentagon took him out for a celebratory dinner last week, even though the Democrats' ascension to power likely means that we will all be receiving subpeonas in the near future because of Chris' findings on Al Qaeda and Iraq. It was always highly ironic that so many of the same Left-wing blogs (i.e. Daily Kos) that rail about Bush Administration conspiracies to fake intelligence and drag the country into wholeheartedly supported Chris' candidacy despite the fact that his discovery helped lead to the decision for war.

But as they say, politics makes for strange bedfellows. Although I disagree with Chris on many domestic political issues (as well as his slavish devotion to the Green Bay Packers), he is honest and intelligent, and will serve the people of PA-10 well.

(By the way, the LA Times, like most papers, errs badly by citing the Senate Intelligence report as a clear dismissal of the links between Al Qaeda and Iraq before the war. The documentary evidence clearly shows that they had contacts for the decade leading up to the war, how extensive we'll likely never know. But for some reason the Senate Intelligence Committee staff chose to disregard all this evidence. Why? Becasuee Saddam and his cronies disputed documents assessed by the intelligence community to be real. Thus, the Intelligence Committee took at face value Saddam's claim that he never considered America to be his enemy despite countless speeches he made to this effect. It is sort of like finding OJ Simpson innocent despite a clear motive, a history of violent behavior, DNA evidence at the scene of the crime, gloves with the victims blood in his apartment, footprints from shoes he's been photographed wearing in the pools of blood just because he said he didn't kill them . . . oh, never mind.)