Is It Friday Yet?

The Senate Democrats pull out Rule 21 out of their bag of tricks to try and get the attention focused back on the War in Iraq and Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame, and the Libby indictment.

Good for them. They've managed to turn themselves into a sideshow.

They have to resort to tricks and procedural actions instead of principled debate because they've lost on the principles and many of their own members had been for the war, before they were against it. Or was it that they were against the war before they were for it. One can never quite tell.

It all depends on the facts on the ground - and those facts are mostly positive despite the repeated noise from the media about the casualties that we've sustained since starting combat in 2003.

And Patrick Fitzgerald has already stated that the Libby indictment has nothing to do with the war, or even the outing of Plame, but rather what Libby said and did during and after he was called to the Grand Jury to testify. His inconsistencies became his downfall, not because he actually leaked any classified information. As Byron York notes:

Perhaps the best explanation for the Democrats' decision to virtually shut down the Senate today can be found in one passage from CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's news conference last Friday:
This indictment is not about the war. This indictment's not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel....The indictment will not seek to prove that the war was justified or unjustified. This is stripped of that debate, and this is focused on a narrow transaction. And I think anyone who's concerned about the war and has feelings for or against shouldn't look to this criminal process for any answers or resolution of that.

Fitzgerald's statement, and his decision to confine the indictment of Lewis Libby to charges of lying and obstruction, threatened to dash the Democrats' hope of using the CIA leak case as an opportunity to re-debate the reasons for going to war in Iraq. So the party, or at least its leaders in the Senate, has decided to use another route, the shutdown of the Senate, as a way to achieve that goal.

That, in a nutshell is why the Senate Democrats are behaving badly.

And would it be wrong for me to point out that the Senate Democrats are pandering to the Far Left wing of the Democratic party. You know, the moonbats, leftists, and communists. Actually, I will point that out since the major media outlets wont.

This is one of the few ways that the Senate Democrats can rally the base these days. They know they don't have the votes on Alito to filibuster and they can't stop the process, they can't get the indictments they want on Plame, and they don't have an actual platform on which to run in 2006. So they're rehashing the anger at Bush '04, and it simply wont work.

Michelle Malkin has more.

UPDATE:
So does Ankle Biting Pundits and Polipundit.

UPDATE:
Powerline wonders just what this stunt has accomplished for Democrats. I concur. I don't think it's done much of anything. Meanwhile, Dave at Garfield Ridge wonders when we'll start hearing leaked information from the closed sessions.

UPDATE:
AJ Strata calls this Civil War in the Senate. I think that's a bit overblown. I think it's parlimentary parlour trickery, and not much else. Macsmind calls this a hissy fit by the left. It's hard to disagree with that.

UPDATE 11/2:
Continuing the hissy fit trend, Confederate Yankee triple dog dares the Democrats to go as far as they think they can. He figures that most Americans will recoil as the Democrats expose themselves to be nothing more than obstructionists. I'm not quite sure that most Americans are even paying attention to what the Democrats are doing these days. This is a red-meat issue. Partisan political creatures are lapping this stuff up but mom and pop in Podunk, Iowa aren't engaged in these issues. They see that the Democrats have tried to shift the debate from the Alito nomination to pre-war intel, which has already been rehashed over and over in their eyes. They wonder why the Democrats have switched away from Alito, and they can only wonder whether the Democrats have already caved in because they're not attacking Alito, but going to other, potentially more fertile political ground.