If not for the human nature of jumping to conclusions the Democrats would be hard pressed to garner enough support for a weenie roast with free beer.

Come to think of it, on August 1st, 2006 John Kerry gave a speech party and hardly anyone showed up. It was Iowa and what minuscule audience there was appears to be reaching for their hearing aid off-buttons. See it for yourself. I find it funny that the only real news story on the topic, posted by Yahoo News a month ago no longer exists.

The secret to Democrats using 'human nature' to control the popular thought is in the set up.

We have a perfect example (of more than one thing, I'm sorry to say) in the recent Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's Super Duper Report on Strawman and other fatal flaws of the use of logic. The other example will show its ugly head at the end of this essay, but no peeking.

We're going to go through an exercise. Don't worry, it won't pull any muscles and you will recover. We'll use an example from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's Super Duper Report on Strawman and other fatal flaws of the use of logic. So for just a moment, put yourself inside the brain of a Democrat.

(Stop screaming.)

As of this writing, Google News is reporting a whopping 924 articles on this very report. Something must have slipped by Google's 'no human hands' news algorithm with the listing of "Iraq and al-Qaeda Untied" (from 'threatswatch.org') in which author Steve Schippert takes a totally non-Democrat mental state in evaluating the report, officially called, "Postwar Findings About Iraq's WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism And How They Compare With Prewar Assessments." 

Rather than compare Schippert's logical evaluation of the report and the new coverage to deductive reasoning at this moment, while you are inside the brain of a Democrat let us access one of the most trusted foreign sources of inductive reasoning: The BBC. Almost as if the subtitle was 'news,' Adam Brookes, writing from Washington, of the BBC proudly pounces on; "The Senate Intelligence Committee has found no evidence of links between the regime of Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda."

The BBC continued: "In a report issued on Friday, it also found that was little or no evidence to support a raft of claims made by the US intelligence community concerning Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."

(Try to remember you're inside the brain of a Democrat.) "The 400-page report was three years in the making, and is probably the definitive public account of the intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq."

"In a poll conducted this month by Opinion Research Corporation for CNN, a sample of American adults was asked: 'Do you think Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 11 September terrorist attacks, or not?' Forty-three percent of those polled answered yes, they believed Saddam was personally involved."

(Democrat reasoning works like this: Take a fact from column 'A', connect it to a fact from column 'B' and conclude all other items in all other columns equal 'A' + 'B'; but wait, its gets better.)

We have a statement that the report took a long time to make, was a whole bunch of pages long and we have conjecture that it is the bible of intelligence knowledge. Then we have a statement that the report 'found' all those 'raft of claims' made by the U.S. were hooey.

Combine those two (inductive reasoning). Jump to conclusion. (Remember you're inside the brain of a Democrat, it comes naturally.) The result is: what?

"The report supports the intelligence community's finding that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - the man who was al-Qaeda's chief operative in Iraq between the invasion and his death in June this year - was indeed in Baghdad in 2002. Was this an Iraqi link to al-Qaeda? No, says the report. Far from harbouring him, Saddam's regime was trying to find and capture him. But the Bush administration has a way, still, of confusing this issue. As recently as 21 August this year, President Bush said that Saddam 'had relations with Zarqawi'."

(OK, I know it is hard and taxing on one's stamina: come out of the trance for just a moment of deductive reasoning.)

We must quote Schippert: "By the report's own acknowledgement, there has yet to be produced a ‘fully researched, coordinated and approved position on the postwar reporting on the former regime's links to al-Qa'ida' by the Intelligence Community with which to compare to prewar assessments. Furthermore, especially with regard to WMD capabilities and 'Regime Intent,' the incredibly thorough Iraqi Perspectives Project postwar study produced by United States Joint Forces Command, Joint Center for Operational Analysis, was not even considered with other postwar assessments. Rather than cite such reports for its postwar input, the SSIC preferred to quote testimony in several instances from both Saddam Hussein and his Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz (among others). Both are in custody and on trial. As Tom Joscelyn rightly points out, these men—'all of whom have an obvious incentive to lie—are cited or quoted without caveats of any sort.' Nor, apparently, did the Committee consider the prewar intelligence cited by Stephen Hayes in November, 2003. Hayes exposes in the referenced article many connections, not the least of which were multiple sources corroborating multiple Iraqi meetings with bin-Laden in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Iraqis – including the deputy director of the Iraqi Intelligence Services. Included in an October 2003 memo from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy to the Chairman and Vice-Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee was a clarifying note saying, 'Reporting entries #4, #11, #15, #16, #17, and #18, from different sources, corroborate each other and provide confirmation of meetings between al Qaeda operatives and Iraqi intelligence in Afghanistan and Pakistan.'" 

Don't tell the BBC, as the intent of their piece is summed in the ending: "It remains to be seen if the Democrats can use the Senate report to damage the Republican Party in the run-up to Congressional elections in November by reminding the American public of the intelligence debacle that preceded the invasion of Iraq, and ascribing that failure to the leadership of the Bush administration. It is far from clear they'll be able to do so. The president has been extremely active in the last week, selling his successes in the "war on terror" in a series of speeches; demanding Congress give him greater powers to fight it; and announcing that the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks will be brought to trial. The Democratic Party still seems unable to find a concerted critique of President Bush's handling of the "war on terrorism" and the conflict in Iraq, without themselves appearing defeatist."

Schippert nails it: "While early in the SSIC report it mentions the attempt to create an intelligence 'baseline,' the conclusions are written in a language that purports them as definitive. In fact, Conclusion 9 on page 112 reads, 'While document exploitation continues, additional reviews of documents recovered in Iraq are unlikely to provide information that would contradict the Committee's findings or conclusions.' This is an ill advisedly bold statement, and notes Michael Tanji, who has been involved in the Iraqi document exploitation process, '[S]aying that you have a strong grasp on what was and wasn't going on in Iraq based on an 'initial review' is akin to saying that you don't need to read the Bible because you've memorized the Ten Commandments.'"

In case you're wondering, the phrase "unlikely to provide information that would contradict", is a defense lawyer spin cycle that if left unchallenged leads the court to a conclusion the evidence would never support, i.e. it leads to jumping to conclusions.

Schippert: "This hardly scratches the surface of the report's inadequate considerations, inconsistencies and, therefore, erroneous conclusions. There are a great many aspects of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report that must be swiftly addressed, in particular the data used and conclusions asserted regarding the connections between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaeda. It is imperative that the American public be presented with a more complete picture than the seemingly selective data points utilized by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report."

None of that matters to the brain of a Democrat. None of it can fit the image created in the Democrat brain. The image cannot support what is not already in it and what it is made of is a painting created through illogical inductive reasoning. A lie is created from combined truths and it becomes the reality the truths are judged by.

Return now, to the colorful landscape of the Democrat brain, and to make you feel at home:

In the New York Times editorial page on Saturday September 9, 2006: "We were certainly relieved that the Senate Intelligence Committee finally made official yesterday what pretty much everyone but President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had already acknowledged: There never was any connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, not even between Mr. Hussein and the self-styled Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Iraq also was not busily trying to build a nuclear weapon before the war, nor did it have a biological weapons program. Those conclusions were contained in documents released by the committee as part of the second phase of its investigation into the prewar intelligence on Iraq. Releasing any documents was a change of pace for the panel's chairman, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, who has consistently tried to stymie this phase of the investigation...Mr. Roberts has consistently defended his actions by saying he was trying to conduct a careful investigation. But yesterday, he denounced Democrats for 'insisting that they were deliberately duped into supporting the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime.' '"That is simply not true," Mr. Roberts said. So much for not prejudging the outcome. If Mr. Roberts has an investigative report supporting that conclusion, we'd sure like to read it." Try this and read what the committee refused to consider, and what they chose to accept as truth.

(Turn off Democrat brain, further examination could be hazardous to your mental health.)

Finally Schippert adds: "...ThreatsWatch and Mark Eichenlaub of Regime of Terror are working together in order to provide an extensive analysis to the general public in a more easily digested format. This analysis will be produced and published as a series of focused examinations of the conclusions tendered by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee's report as it pertains to the connections between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaeda terrorists." Perhaps the New York Times would read that report? It is doubtful they would comprehend anything that did not match their pre-conceived jump to conclusion.

In the mean time, the Republican committee members, who outnumber the Democrat committee members, managed to allow the report to be in its present form, to be filled with assumptions and 'lawyer speak', to be misused by the minority to create an outcome that is not new and is presented in such a fashion that it becomes instant support for the lunatic fringe of the country and every tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist who can read in her tent in Crawford Texas.

Republican spine seems to be dramatically missing and that is the other perfect example of how Democrats count on human nature to weave distortion and inductive reasoning into the 'common sense' of a nation. The opposition is too scared to face them down. The media is either too left or not smart enough to parse and deductively reason the spin. That leaves the Republican Senate spine to stand up for the truth. Sadly, even as the Democrats strive to force the rejection of free speech, threatening legal action and Senate behavior to stop a 9/11 made-for-TV movie, there appears to be no spine in the Republican committee or the Senate leadership.