One would have thought after five years of war reporterette Anne E. Kornbut would be somewhat clear on who exactly the combatants are in Iraq but then one would be working under the assumption that basic honesty and integrity are useful traits when you are in the tank for Barack Obama and writing a tawdry hit piece in his support.

In a front page story in today’s Washington Post headlined Palin Links Iraq to Sept. 11 In Talk to Troops in Alaska, Kornblut tries to link a 100% true statement made by Governor Palin to the lefty meme “Saddam had nothing to do with 9-11″ which they wave around in a manner reminiscent of Pee-wee Herman in a movie theater.

The venue was the departure from Fairbanks, AK of the 25th Infantry Division’s Stryker Brigade Combat Team for service in northern Iraq. Sarah Palin, Alaska governor and mother of SPC Track Palin, was on hand to see them off.

The Stryker Brigade will be deployed to the area around Taji, Iraq which has been a hotbed of al Qaeda activity.

What tipped reporterette Anne E. Kornblut and her editor over the edge into sheer wingnuttery is this:

FORT WAINWRIGHT, Alaska, Sept. 11 — Gov. Sarah Palin linked the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling an Iraq-bound brigade of soldiers that included her son that they would “defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans.”

Admittedly, I’m not a reporter for the Washington Post so I can’t hear the dKos dogwhistles but this statement is true in ever particular. That brigade will be going to Iraq to fight the people that planned and executed and, indeed, rejoiced in the attacks of 9-11-01. Those people being al-Qaeda. Under any other interpretation Kornblut has to believe that Palin is talking about fighting the ghosts of the hijackers.

From this simple statement, Kornblut, however, abandons reality and goes for the standard lefty talking point:

The idea that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaeda plan the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a view once promoted by Bush administration officials, has since been rejected even by the president himself.

Fine. But exactly no one at that ceremony said that and what that has to do with anything Governor Palin said is anyone’s guess. (And, for the record, the fact that the Bush administration has rejected something doesn’t mean what they rejected was wrong. It just means they rejected it.)

Having made her linkage (Palin says the troops are going to fight the people that carried out the 9-11 attacks…the troops are going to Iraq…ergo, Palin said that Iraq was involved in 9/11) she follows it up with this disclaimer:

But it is widely agreed that militants allied with al-Qaeda have taken root in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion.

When the number two guy in al-Qaeda boasts about being in Iraq I suppose that could be interpreted as “widely agreed” though I think most of us would call it “incontrovertible fact.”

What Kornblut is doing is clear. She’s on the pad for the Obama campaign (I’m not the first to notice that) and is contributing to the effort to portray Sarah Palin, a woman much more accomplished than Kornblut, , as some sort of naïf. Last evening, for instance, Dan McLaughlin observed that TalkingPointsMemo has gone as far as denying that the NATO charter carries with it an obligation to mutual defense.

It isn’t going to work and eventually this collection of mouthbreathers will discover that all they are doing is burning down their own credibility.