So I see from Kevin Drum that postings of a 1999 ABC News clip purportedly proving a deep Saddam-Osama connection are showing up on the Internet Right. (Of course, as Kevin says, we know there were contacts and they didn't amount to much.)

Kevin says that "the damning video first got dredged up by a radio show called The War Room With Quinn & Rose" and was picked up by a couple of righty bloggers, and that Power Line "got it from a reader" and it also spread from there.

Oh, please. This isn't spontaneous. This is top-down stuff made to look like ground-up stuff. The day after Bush's Fort Bragg speech we had a GOP back-bencher linking Saddam to 9/11, and we also have Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard going on about "the connection" again.

Is this just an effort to pull Bush's poll numbers out of the doldrums, or is it also intended to cast doubt on the notion that the administration went to war on false premises, in time for a possible Karl Rove perjury trial centered on Joe Wilson and the Niger-uranium claim? A bit of both, I suppose. I think it's Rove's work.