MICHAEL KELLY is landing one more blow on Al Gore:

There was Al Gore, telling the world that the killers of Sept. 11 had “gotten away with it” and broadly (if, in his trademark weaselly fashion, coyly) suggesting that the president of the United States was pursuing war for the selfish purpose of winning votes in November. Two days later, there was Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle picking up on Gore’s repulsive slander and vastly amplifying it on the floor of the Senate. A few days later, there was House Democratic leader Richard A. Gephardt, in a mostly reasonable op-ed column, echoing the calumny: “President Bush himself has decided to play politics with the safety and security of the American people.”

And, last Sunday, there were — most memorably, most indefensibly, most obscenely — two Democratic congressmen, former whip David E. Bonior of Michigan and Jim McDermott of Washington, beamed live from Baghdad, to literally parrot Hussein’s line — to tell Americans that, as McDermott said, “the president would mislead the American people” in order to get his war, but that, by contrast, “you have to take the Iraqis on their value, at their face value.”

This is not a little cabal of contributors to the Nation telling the world that the American president is not to be believed and that he wishes to send Americans off to fight and possibly die in Iraq because war is good for his party. These are men in the leadership ranks of the Democratic Party. This is the party’s mainstream. This is what it, again, has revealed itself to be. Parties do the darnedest things. To themselves.

I think that some Democrats were hoping the Torricelli flap would at least push these things out of the news. Hasn’t happened yet. As I said Monday: What were they thinking?