Let's take a look at the lead-ins for those stories. One assumes you read them, right?

1. EDITORIAL No Politics -- Just the Truth

The protracted partisan maneuvering in Washington cannot be allowed to conceal a lingering, fundamental question about Iraq: Where are the weapons of mass destruction that Bush administration officials insisted the United States needed to destroy because they so urgently threatened this nation?

2. Politicized Memo Incites Row: Intelligence Panel Minority Laid Out Attack on Final Report

A barely contained partisan squabble over assessing blame for the apparent failure to find chemical and biological weapons in Iraq broke into the open yesterday when Republican senators said they had a memorandum indicating their Democratic colleagues were preparing a campaign to disparage a Senate committee report on the quality of prewar intelligence before it is even completed.

A senior Democrat countered that Republicans had probably stolen the memo from a trash can or a computer file.

3. GOP Slams Dems' WMD Memo

Republican Sen. Pat Roberts said Democrats have undermined the inquiry he is leading into Iraq prewar intelligence by drafting a memo aimed at discrediting the Senate Intelligence Committee's work.

The Kansan is chairman of the committee. The memo was written by Democratic committee staff and was not finalized or circulated among members of the committee, said the panel's senior Democrat, West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller.

4. Dems, GOP feud over Iraq memo

A simmering feud over prewar intelligence on Iraq erupted into open battle on the Senate floor Wednesday, triggered by a Democratic staff memo vowing to expose what it said were the Bush administration's "misleading, if not flagrantly dishonest, methods and motives" in making the case for war.

5. Frist Freezes Senate Probe of Prewar Iraq Data

Angry about a leaked Democratic memo, the Republican leadership of the Senate yesterday took the unusual step of canceling all business of the committee investigating prewar intelligence on Iraq.

6. As the Session Winds Down, Sniping Rises on Capitol Hill

The Senate ground to a halt on Friday in a wave of political recriminations as Democrats accused the Republican majority and the White House of treating them arrogantly and dismissively. Republicans, in turn, demanded a formal apology for a Democratic memorandum they said reeked of trying to politicize the inquiry into how intelligence was used in the buildup to the Iraq war.

7. THE STRUGGLE FOR IRAQ: INTELLIGENCE REVIEW; Republican and Democratic Panel Leaders Take Feud to the Senate Floor

Five months after the Senate Intelligence Committee began its review of prewar intelligence on Iraq, a contentious dispute broke out on the Senate floor on Wednesday as the panel's top Republican and Democrat traded accusations of bad faith.

8. Senators on Intelligence Panel Clash on Talk Show

The Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a senior Democratic member of the panel clashed in unusually sharp and public ways today in a dispute that has interrupted the committee's review of prewar intelligence on Iraq.

9. Senate Panel Wrangles Over Iraq Inquiry

It was a considerable test for the Senate Intelligence Committee's tradition of nonpartisanship: Could it resist political pressures as it examined whether President Bush based his decision to go to war with Iraq on sound intelligence?

The answer appears to be no.

There's more than one way to spike an issue. Notice that the big part of the story is that Democrats and Republicans are "squabbling" over something. The fact that a plan was proposed by the Democrats on a committee with access to classified information to use it for political advantage is largely ignored, except for quotes from outraged Republicans, and the subject is usually changed quickly to start slamming Republicans. Example 1 is particularly delicious.

Note that despite the fact the memo was from a Democratic staffer you automatically assume it is officially Party Policy. But then your standards of evidence are lower than mine ;-)

If you think some lowly staffer thought this up on his own, I've got a bridge to sell you.

The excuses the Democrats have been giving have been pathetic, including claims that the memo was never distributed (right...I suppose it was written up in the first place so that the staffer could just mail it to himself).