If there was any any doubt that the Democrats have had a string of miserable days since last Thursday, today's invocation of Rule 21 makes it pretty clear Democrats have had enough of the Bush counterattack. Frustration over the Miers withdraw, the Fitzmas fizzle and yesterday's Alito nomination pushed the Democrats to take today's action.

Short term, this is a smart move by the Democrats because it puts the intelligence issue and the Libby indictment back into the headlines and gives energy to their base who have become severely depressed over the last few days. Steve Clemons writes at The Washington Note:

I'm impressed. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is currently on C-Span lambasting Reid and his leadership for this move, which Frist is calling sneaky and underhanded.

Frist actually just said that he will be "unable to trust Senator Reid for the next year and half of this Congressional session." Frist said that the Democrats have gone into the gutter to fight.

I think it was bold and a very constructive move by Reid.

While it may be a positive short-term maneuver, I question the wisdom of this move over the longer term. The Alito nomination has laid the groundwork for a real nasty couple of months in the U.S. Senate and this stunt by the Democrats is only going to serve to unify the entire GOP caucus, at exactly the time when the Democrats only hope to beat the Alito nomination is their ability to fracture GOP loyalty and pull 6 Senators over to their side (either to vote outright against Alito or a refusal to vote for the nuclear option). Today's invocation of Rule 21 is not going to help Senate Democrats in this cause, and in fact, it makes whatever small chance the Dems had of defeating Alito, even smaller.

As far as the "reason" for the stunt today, Fitzgerald made it pretty clear on Friday that his investigation had nothing to do with the war in Iraq:

This indictment is not about the war. This indictment's not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any vindication of how they feel.

This is simply an indictment that says, in a national security investigation about the compromise of a CIA officer's identity that may have taken place in the context of a very heated debate over the war, whether some person -- a person, Mr. Libby -- lied or not.

The indictment will not seek to prove that the war was justified or unjustified.

And no matter how often the Democrats repeat the myth that Bush and Cheney manufactured the Iraq WMD story, the facts clearly do not support that argument. Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, the French, the Russians, the Egyptians, the Israelis, the Germans, the Brits, the U.N......I could go on and on, ALL believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

One can honorably debate the wisdom of whether or not it made sense to go to war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. One can also debate whether the war has been prosecuted intelligently of competently. Serious people, however, can not debate whether or not the majority of the intelligence agencies of the world believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Senate Democrats need to read Peter Beinart's piece in the latest Blueprint Magazine and recognize that their party's weakness on national security issues is a major liability in this post 9/11 world. And while short-term fantasies about Cheney machinations and Rove cover-ups may make their base happy and excite some in the MSM, they do little in the long-term to convince the American people that they are a party prepared to seriously deal with the national security threats this country faces in the years ahead.