Over at the Powerline Blog, Scott Johnson offers a very puzzling response to a new report in the National Journal about a CIA pre-war intelligence report on Iraq. Here's an excerpt from the National Journal story:

  Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.
  . . .
  One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime.
  . . .
  The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the White House for the CIA assessment, the PDB of September 21, 2001, and dozens of other PDBs as part of the committee's ongoing investigation into whether the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information in the run-up to war with Iraq. The Bush administration has refused to turn over these documents.

  Maybe this story is a big deal; maybe it's not. It's hard to tell without knowing more details. But I found Scott's response to the report rather surprising: He sees it as evidence that the "Democrats" are waging a "war" against the Bush Administration at the expense of the national interest. He begins his post, titled "The War They Believe In", with the following paragraph:

  The only war the Democrats really have their heart in is the war to undermine the Bush administration. Any incidental damage done to the national interest in furtherance of that war appears in their eyes to be for the greater good.

  Now, for starters, the claim that "Democrats" believe it's "for the greater good" to cause "[a]ny incidental damage to the national interest" in an effort to hurt the Bush Administration is, well, completely absurd. But the more interesting question to me is why Scott sees the National Journal story as evidence of a Democratic "war" on the Bush administration that threatens the national interest. It's not entirely clear from the post, but the argument seems to be based on the possibility that a Democrat leaked classified information to the National Journal. To be sure, Scott doesn't seem to have any evidence that "Democrats" were the source of the story, as opposed to someone who is a "Republican" or even an "Independent." As best I can tell, Democratic involvement is supposed to be self-evident in a circular way: the Democrats are out to destroy Bush, which means that a story critical of Bush was probably the work of Democrats, which proves that the Democrats are out to destroy Bush. Am I missing something, or is that the gist of the connection?