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When you come to think of it, that “doctrine” explains a lot more than just the crazed way the Bush administration has run its “war on terror.”

Take, for instance, yesterday’s bombshell announcement by Santorum and Hoekstra that WMD, (buried artillery shells armed with some sort of poison gas), have been discovered in Iraq after all.

Take, for another for instance, some examples of the right wing response to the two Senators joint press conference.

Only one explanation makes sense; these are people who operate within an assumption that if a given fact, idea, interpretation, or opinion has a one percent possibility that there is any truth to it, it is, thereby, true, and all further discussion must be devoted to excavating the implications of its given truth.
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Captain Ed spent yesterday breathlessly monitoring major media’s response to the story; today, his ardor for its truth and significance is untroubled by such details that the shells, while they did show traces of chemical gases, pre-date the first Gulf War, or that they appear to have been buried near the Iranian border during the Iraq-Iran war, and then forgotten by the Iraqis, or that, most important, they were already degraded by the time of the first Gulf war.

And so it will go; another set of “facts,” or perhaps we ought to name this concept “factorums,” that will be hauled out again and again in self-referential proofs of the rightness of the right on Iraq, and who knows, at some point maybe enough dust can be kicked up to convince a few more Americans.

Here’s Hugh Hewitt, who had Santorum as a guest on his radio show yesterday, continuing the assault on reality, unabashed and unembarrassed by the paucity of actual facts that might even suggest this is a significant turn of events.

And then there’s The Corner: James Robbins can’t think of a single reason why the administration hasn’t released, in a systematic way, all we’ve learned about Saddam’s WMD, and don’t forget all those ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda.

Irony of ironies, he quotes Hans Blix honest report of a discrepancy between reported manufacture of bombs, as compared with records of those dropped on Iran, and never mind all the Iraqi Survey Group has found out since then, which Blix might have found out if we hadn’t cut off the inspection process.

Perhaps this stockpile of 500 munitions was part of that group. If so it is surely worthy of note. But if Rep. Santorum is using an unclassified study, which appears to be the case, one might ask why wasn’t this released by the White House in the first place at a time when it could have made a difference? This is another example of the failure to publish the discoveries we have made since the fall of Saddam’s regime in a systematic fashion and originating at high levels. We know a lot more now about the WMDs that existed, and about the definite links to terrorists, not to mention all the human rights offenses committed by Saddam’s regime.

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It is mind boggling that this has not been done. This failure to communicate is one of the major reasons why public support for the war effort has been sagging.

And here’s Andy McCarthy riffing off of Jim and Jonah’s recognition of the “underwhelming” evidence presented by Santorum and Hoekstra, complete with a reference to the previous “factorum” about Atta’s meeting with an Iraqi in Prague.

Old factorums never die, nor does their faux-truth fade away.

What is interesting to consider is the possible etiology of yesterday’s news conference; Rep. Hoekstra, let us remember, is the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. The right is pinning its hopes on the fact that the material at the press conference was only a small, unclassified portion of a larger document, authored by Negroponte. The source of the material is noted as Army National Ground Intelligence Center, down in Charlottesville, Virginia.

And what might that institution be? Laura Rozen helps out here:

That would be MZM, lately chaired by one imprisoned-for-bribery Mitchell J. Wade. And as Walter Pincus reported, MZM systematically hired relatives of top NGIC officials, and then the NGIC officials themselves, as they started to seek and win ever larger contracts to provide database intel services to the Army center. And as I remember from eRiposte’s analysis of the Senate Intel committee Phase I report, NGIC had a strikingly bad record on aluminum tubes.

Laura theorizes that this is a coordinated Republican effort, with White House cooperation.

I don’t doubt it. My question - aside from bolstering the Republican side in the recent congressional debates on Iraqi policy, is the White House trying to distract attention from whatever coverage might accrue to the publication of Ron Suskind’s book, and the explosive material it contains. It srikes me that coverage has already been meager and mostly pro forma.

Majablog has a good piece on this new Santorum factorum.