Santorum's spin on Iraqi WMD; or, what happens when desperation takes over

As Steve Benen noted the other day at The Carpetbagger Report (where I'm guest blogging yesterday through Sunday, with posts both here and there), Rick Santorum, arguably the Senate's most offensive member, still lags well behind his Democratic rival in Pennsylvania, Bob Casey. A recent poll puts the margin at 18 points. And Santorum's job approval rating stands at an anemic 38 percent.

Santorum must be desperate. Desperate to do something, anything, to narrow the margin. His very political career hangs in the balance. If he loses in November, he's through, likely for good. If he wins, his Clinton-like comeback will be celebrated in Republican circles and — who knows? — a Veep spot could be in the offing (or, eventually, perhaps even the top spot).

How do I know he's desperate? Consider the latest bit of evidence, his latest episode of rabble-rousing spin. Yesterday afternoon, Senator Santorum announced this: "We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons." Huge news, no? After all this, after all the fumbling and bumbling, the White House shilling and the indiscriminate killing, it may all have been worth it after all. For if Saddam really did possess WMD, if he really was such a threat not just to the Middle East but to America's national security itself, well, perhaps the exoneration of Bush can commence (with demands for mea culpas from Democrats, of course), perhaps the tide truly has turned, perhaps the GOP upsurge will begin and Republicans will re-embrace the Iraq War in earnest and sweep through the November elections, Democrats be eternally damned.

Or not.

Fox News, as expected, lapped up the story with characteristic glee, "fair" and "balanced" only with respect to its unabashed partisanship and shameful disregard for journalism. It's uncritical lede: "The United States has found 500 chemical weapons in Iraq since 2003, and more weapons of mass destruction are likely to be uncovered, two Republican lawmakers said Wednesday."

Needless to say, the right-wing blogosphere has joined in. That sound you hear coming from that spin-struck echo chamber is a collective seizure of jubilation. (Captain) Ed Morrissey, for example, is calmer than most, but a tone of told-you-so righteousness peeks out from behind his post's thin veneer of wait-and-see optimism. And he's not alone. Glenn Reynolds thinks the WMD issue could now rebound on "war opponents". At Outside the Beltway, Chris Lawrence thinks that this discovery "further undermine[s] claims from the anti-war fringe that Iraq had declared and destroyed its stocks of non-conventional weaponry". (Uh, the "fringe"?) And so on and so on. Go check out Memeorandum for more of the same.

So what to make of this? Well, here's Powerline's John Hinderaker, who deviates from all this enthusiasm to throw in some healthy perspective:

This is certainly significant, but what they're talking about is old munitions left over from, presumably, before the first Gulf War. This doesn't appear to constitute evidence that Saddam's regime had continued to manufacture chemical weapons in more recent years. What it does demonstrate is that the picture with respect to Iraq's WMDs is much more nuanced than the usual "he didn't have any" mantra.

Fair enough. Saddam had some, once upon a time, and he may have sought to acquire them once again, but he didn't have them before the second Gulf War, the Iraq War, and he certainly didn't have them in the way that the war's chief proponents — Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, the neocons, etc. — said he did. (Remember all those "mushroom cloud" comments?)

But this is really nothing more than Santorumnal (my neologism for today) grandstanding. And I can't put my response to this nonsense any better than the Maha of The Mahablog, Barbara O'Brien:

I keep reading, and find that this is not a new discovery, but an account of some stuff found in Iraq since May 2004. And it wasn’t exactly “500 chemical weapons,” as Fox News reported, but 500 chemical weapons shells. These shells contained old, degraded mustard OR sarin “nerve agents” dating from before the Gulf War, but for some reason nobody was interested enough to analyze the stuff to find out for sure what it was. The declassified document detailing the “discovery” — released by our old pal John Negroponte, note — is artfully vague about how much toxin was actually contained in the shells and what condition the toxin was in. Or even exactly what it was.

Apparently Rick Santorum, whose Senate career is in its final throes, got his hands on a classified document from the National Ground Intelligence Center. He pulled key points out of the document and had them declassified, and then made a big whoop-dee-doo announcement that he had in his hand proof that there were WMDs in Iraq…

As Barbara implies, Santorum is the new McCarthy. When all else fails — and it's all failing for the junior senator from Pennsylvania — pull a stunt like this. How stupid does he think we are? How stupid does he think the voters of his great state are? Pretty stupid, one must presume.

But such is what happens when desperation takes over. I expect little else from Santorum, not to mention from Fox News and the right-wing blogosphere, but it's all quite distasteful nonetheless.

Distasteful? It's pathetic. And it won't work.