Such seasoned Democratic strategists as Donna Brazile, Al Gore's 2000 campaign manager, are making a strong case in favor of the first option. "Our party and its leaders must wake up to the fact that we can no longer give short shrift to security issues if we hope to regain our status as the majority party," she recently wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed coauthored with Timothy Bergreen, the founder of Democrats for National Security. They believe their party can — indeed must — resurrect the traditions of such muscular Democrats as Sen. Scoop Jackson, Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Jack Kennedy.

But returning to that tradition implies moving away from the more pacific approaches of such Democratic leaders as Walter Mondale, Gene McCarthy, George McGovern, and Michael Dukakis. And the left wing of the Democratic party wants no part of such a shift.

Instead, Democrats such as presidential hopeful Howard Dean, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, and Sen. Carl Levin and favor option (2); they're looking to the Carter election as a model. But not content to pray for a new Republican scandal, they're hoping to manufacture one by transforming the mystery over what's become of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction into a scandal. Or, as one Democratic strategist candidly said to me backstage at CNN the other day: "What's lying about sex compared to lying about war? This will be another Watergate."

From an excellent NRO article on the Democrat's headlong rush towards political suicide. Here's the payoff:

Democrat scandalmongers are not pondering such questions. Instead, they are peddling a scenario so fantastic that not even Saddam's mouthpiece, Baghdad Bob, would have dared trot it out: That there were no WMDs and Bush knew it — but that he pretended otherwise as part of a vast (right-wing?) conspiracy that would have included Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Tony Blair — and, of course, Bill Clinton, who bombed what he said were suspected WMD sites in 1998, after the U.N. inspectors were forced to go home. And don't forget to include the U.N. Security Council, every member of which signed Resolution 1441 which did not ask whether Saddam had WMDs but rather gave his regime "a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations."

That's all the wisdom on one foot, as we say in Israel. There's no credible argument that Saddam never had WMDs. The only questions are where he hid them or how he got rid of them, neither of which are being asked by the Democrats. They want us to buy an obviously insane conspiracy theory which any honest or responsible person knows is politically motivated balderdash. Par for the course I would say. Good luck Donna, you're gonna need it.