Riiiiiight, Tom. Sure, nobody was playing politics when the Democratic dissent gets redacted to ribbons and the Republican statements are untouched. And sure I'll somehow conclude that if there was partisanship, it was somehow the minority Democrats, lacking any power, who masochistically decided to redact their own comments.

I understand that it's RightWing SOP to blame bad news on a conspiracy, but how in the world do you expect me to buy the assertion that the intelligence community is simultaneously anti-Bush and anti-Democrat? When faced with a paradox, apply Occam's Razor: Who does the "intelligence community" work for? Are the top several layers of leadership not occupied by Bush appointees? Was it not the embarrassing charges leveled against the Bush Administration that were suppressed? By anti-Bush people? What?

I mean, seriously...

I have no idea how Democrats could conclude that suddenly the "intelligence community" is going to rally behind Bush by covering up information.

Oh gee, I dunno, could it be the pattern of heavy redaction of the Democratic charges and hands-off the Republican rationalizations? The facts don't in any way support your spin, Tom. That report would have turned out very differently if the "intelligence community" were anti-Bush.

And Tom, you're trying to gloss over the Democratic claim that in at least one case it wasn't the vague "intelligence community" that ordered a redaction, it was the White House itself. Are you going to persist in trying to claim with a straight face that it was the Democrats playing politics here, that it's not evidence of a coverup that the Republican-led Committee let the Republican White House decide what it could and couldn't reveal? You see nothing out-of-order in the fact that only the Democratic comments got censored?

Does any of that actually make sense to you, or are you just jerking my chain?