THE DOUG FEITH WING OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY. From Mike Rubin and Andy McCarthy over at The Corner and Eli Lake of The New York Sun comes word of a truly bizarre NRSC NRCC attack on a Democratic candidate for the PA-10, Chris Carney. Liddy DoleTom Reynolds's forces have sent out a mailing accusing Carney of "having failed our nation" by being part of a Pentagon effort to tie Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda before the war. Now, the substance of the message is, well, true, as I reported in a piece for my former employers, and I suspect that with the exception of the attack on a Democrat, most Tapped readers wouldn't object to the NRCC's characterization. When I hung out with Carney on the stump for an afternoon in Honesdale, Pa., in March, he forthrightly acknowledged that he still believes there's more to the Iraq-al-Qaeda tie than the 9/11 Commission et. al. concluded.
However, Carney also advocates an accelerated let-'em-stand-up-and-let-us-get-the-hell-out-of-Iraq position, which is way, way out of tune with the NRCC. And then there's the small matter of Reynolds's conundrum: what Carney did at the Pentagon in 2002 was what Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush wanted, which was to find any evidence that could support a pretext to invade Iraq. The GOP generally believes this was, you know, a good thing. If they have a problem with Carney, they have a huge problem with the war, and a huge problem with Bush -- which for the GOP is well, a huge problem.
UPDATE: Corrected thanks to sharp-eyed commenters.
--Spencer Ackerman
