So now, Democrats have a choice: (1) Restore their party's credibility on matters of war and peace, or (2) bet that another scandal will get voters angry enough to again throw the Republican rascals out of the White House.

Such seasoned Democratic strategists as Donna Brazile, Al Gore's 2000 campaign manager, are making a strong case in favor of the first option...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.

...

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 \ufffd but that he pretended otherwise as part of a vast (right-wing?) conspiracy that would have included Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Tony Blair \ufffd 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."

The Democrats have a dilemma. Donna Brazile, Tim Bergreen, and other sober-minded Democrats have a way out, a way that will make it harder for Republicans to win elections but easier for Americans to become more secure in an era of great peril. By contrast, Howard Dean and his friends are digging a hole that it could take Democrats a generation to get out of.