Is the Right Worried....

.... about the Downing Street Memos? You bet. And you can tell by the hopelessly contradictory ways they're trying to spin it:

1. the memos are forgeries
2. the memos are genuine but inaccurate
3. the memos tell us stuff we already know
4. bush lied about WMDs, but so what? we won in Iraq (or will....someday...maybe) and everyone's better for it.

So let's take these one at a time.

1) AP, the Washington Post, and other news outlets have independently confirmed the authenticity of the memos' content. The only Redstaters who believe the forgery theory are brain dead (Rush Limbaugh, your cell phone is vibrating).

2) Inaccurate? Hmm, let's see. The memos say evidence of WMDs was thin. Turns out it was so thin as to be invisible. They strongly imply that evidence of WMDs was either fabricated or cherrypicked. Both are true -- the Niger 'yellowcake' memo was a forgery, and "curveball" -- the primary intelligence source for chemical and biological weapons -- was not only a liar on a grand scale but a close relative of an aide to Ahmed Chalabi, the Bushies' hand-picked man to lead Iraq. I could go on at length, but I won't.

3) The memos confirm things we've long suspected. Big difference. These are official documents on the scale of the Pentagon Papers. Taken by themselves, they are damaging; in conjunction with what we know about the manipulation of intelligence in the Bush Administration, they're damning.

4) I suggest anyone who thinks Iraq is in better shape today than it was three years ago should move there, immediately. But even if it were, the essential fact remains that the Bush White House used the threat of WMDs as a pretext for a war they'd already started. They knew if they revealed their real intentions (and you can fill in the blank here -- from regime change to democracy in the middle east to oil profits), the American people would not have supported the war.

That's not how things are supposed to work in a democracy. Assuming, that is, we still live in one.