Inside Politics

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The Republican National Committee has just released everything it could dig up about the Democratic presidential candidates, and it isn’t a pretty sight. Here’s an abbreviated version of the committee’s key findings:

• Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois: “An inexperienced, insulated, arrogant, unabashed liberal.”

• New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson: “A self-promoting, Washington insider with a controversial record.”

• Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut: “A New England liberal, past his prime, on an unrealistic vanity run for the White House.”

• Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York: “A calculating, divisive, lifelong liberal with political baggage.”

• Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware: “An undisciplined, self-described Northeast liberal, in love with the sound of his own voice.”

• Former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina: “A hypocritical, inexperienced liberal with a new negative attitude.”

• Former Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa: “A tax-hiking, mismanaging, ‘blip’ candidate with no foreign policy experience.”

Red Queen trial

“The trial of I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby is the closest version of a Red Queen trial this country has had in a long time. One says that knowing it might start a stampede from past defendants laying claim to the most upside-down prosecution,” Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger writes.

“Lewis G. Carroll’s account of the Knave’s trial before the Red Queen and White Rabbit is famous for the Queen’s dictum, ‘Sentence first, verdict afterward.’ But read the full transcript of the mock trial and one will see that the real subject is not justice, but the humiliation of the defendant,” Mr. Henninger said.

“The trial of Scooter Libby in Washington, the national capital of illogic, has been exemplary. In December 2003, the prosecutor purports a crime has been committed by revealing a ‘covert’ CIA agent’s identity to the press — despite knowing then what the outside world learned nearly three years later — that the revealer of the agent was a State Department official, Richard Armitage. With the ‘whodunnit’ solved on day one, the prosecution follows the Red Queen’s script by taking the nation on a useless, joyless ride through the opaque looking-glass of Washington journalism.

“The testimony of three of the world’s most sophisticated journalists — Judith Miller, Matthew Cooper and Tim Russert — was the trial’s closest thing to the White Rabbit reading nonsense verse to the jury: ‘For this must ever be a secret, kept from all the rest, between yourself and me.’

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