I'll get into Sandy Berger's pants, crowded as they are, momentarily. But let me sneak up on them in a roundabout way.
You do it, Mark. I ain't going near them!
A few days ago, I woke up to find an e-mail from a pal enclosing the following UPI story:

"Iraqi security reportedly discovered three missiles carrying nuclear heads concealed in a concrete trench northwest of Baghdad, official sources said Wednesday."

"Isn't that GREAT NEWS?" asked my friend, rhetorically. Well, the story didn't pan out, and a couple of hours later he e-mailed again to apologize for the premature yelping and high-fiving, and adding that he hadn't meant it was GREAT NEWS Saddam had nukes, only that it was GREAT NEWS because it would ruin John Kerry's and Michael Moore's day.

True. And that sums up perfectly the rotten state of domestic politics in America. A frivolous uncivil civil war is draining all the energy away from the real war.
Preach it, brother! Shout it from the rooftops!
Take, for example, Max Cleland, Vietnam veteran and former Georgia senator.
No thanks.
Last week, speaking in his role as Kerry campaign mascot, he said Bush went to war with Iraq because "he basically concluded his daddy was a failed president" and he "wanted to be Mr. Macho Man" so he "flat-out lied." Blistering stuff, huh? Would this be the same Max Cleland who voted to authorize war with Iraq in the U.S. Senate? Perhaps, as he's so insightful about the president's psychology, he could enlighten us as to his own reasons for wanting war with Iraq? Any daddy hang-ups there, Mr. Macho? ...

And that's really what Americans should be asking. Aside from the letterheads, what's changed? The 9/11 report is fine and dandy if you want to know what went wrong that morning. But at least those underperforming federal mediocrities had an excuse: They didn't know it was 9/11. What excuse did Sposato and her colleagues have six months later when they were mailing out the al-Qaida visas? And what are those federal agencies like now, three years on? My sense is that the administration has found it very difficult to change the complacent bureaucratic culture Max Cleland wanted to preserve.

And here's where I have some sympathy with Sandy Berger and his overloaded pants. By his own words, he's guilty of acts that any other American would go to jail for. He "inadvertently" shoved 30-page classified documents down his pants and then "inadvertently" lost them at home and then "inadvertently" returned to the National Archives to "inadvertently" take another draft of the same 30-page document and "inadvertently" lost that, too. He "inadvertently" made forbidden cell phone calls from the room with the classified documents, and he "inadvertently" took more suspicious bathroom breaks while in the Archives than that Syrian band took on that L.A. flight that was in the news last week. If the former national security adviser has an incontinence problem, that at least explains where he was during the '90s when Osama bin Laden was growing bolder and bolder on his watch.
Ouch!

But, if Berger was simply covering his buns (literally), I don't care. The minute the decision was taken to convene a 9/11 commission during election season, it was obvious that it would boil down to who was most to blame for the day -- the eight months of the Bush administration, or the eight years of Bill Clinton -- and, given the Clintonian penchant for playing fast and loose with the rules, Sandy Berger wandering out with his pants stuffed tighter than Al Gore's jeans on that Rolling Stone cover has a kind of tacky inevitability about it. Who screwed up worst should have been left to the historians, which means when the war is over...

What matters is where we're headed, not where we were. And, in that respect, John Kerry is still looking through the rear window. Not so much because of his remarkably poor choice of advisers -- Joe Wilson (the Politics Of Truth fraud), Max Cleland (with his schoolyard cries of "Liar, liar!") and Sandy Berger (with his pants on fire) -- but because Kerry's prescriptions (the U.N., the French) are so Sept. 10. A holiday from history is one thing. The Democrats are now embarked on a holiday from reality.