A softball made necessary by yesterday’s kerfuffle. The left will shriek at his suggestion that AQI does business with Shiite sects but there’s always been circumstantial evidence that that’s true, and not just about the organization’s Iraqi chapter either. The question for the campaign is how much they want to emphasize it. Tying Iran to an enemy the public is familiar with is a shortcut way of making them grasp the threat, but it risks getting bogged down in having to prove the link conclusively with voters already wary of intel failures after the WMD debacle. There are so many other dangers you could point to — Iran’s rhetoric, the nuclear program, the coordination with Sadr and the other militias, their proxy reach throughout the region — that stressing their connection to an outfit that’s already been crippled inside the country seems like the weakest way to go. Reducing the war on terror to Al Qaeda is really the left’s game anyway.

If they want to nitpick him for anything, they should do it for saying, “I know that Sunni and Al Qaeda are closely tied.” That’s an odd way of describing that particular Venn diagram, but close enough, I guess.

RedLasso thinks they’ve worked out the bugs with their video player; if you’re upgraded to the latest version of Flash, you should be good to go, but let me know if not and I’ll cut this myself.