Steve Hayes and Jeff Goldberg, adorably, really believe that the Joint Forces Command report that refutes their lies about Saddam working with Al Qaeda actually vindicates them. Or, to play mindreader for a second, they don’t, but they really don’t want to admit that their reputations are built on deception. So they’ll run what might be called the Audacity Gambit: bluff so confidently in the face of reality that, they hope, their critics will be too confused to respond.

The thing is, that only works if their ideological confreres put forward a unified front. And today, even the staunchly conservative The Washington Times had to bow to reality. Here’s how Rowan Scarborough described the report’s findings:

A Pentagon-funded study of the documents failed to find a direct link between Saddam and al Qaeda, the group that carried out the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. But it did establish Iraqi support for Egyptian Islamic Jihad, whose leader Ayman al-Zawahri merged the group with al Qaeda years later. …

Agreeing with previous intelligence reports, the [report] said the documents showed no direct operational link between Iraq and al Qaeda, a connection that had been suggested by the Bush administration before the war. The Bush administration has not been eager to redebate its reasons for the invasion. …

A 2006 Senate intelligence committee report said the postwar investigations by the intelligence community found only two confirmed al Qaeda-Iraq contacts. This spurred charges from Democrats that the Bush White House had politicized prewar intelligence.

Since then, government analysts have continued to examine thousands of translated Iraqi documents to get a clearer picture of the Saddam-terror axis. It was in that vein that the IDA wrote its report, “Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents.”

Lawrence L. Korb, an analyst at the liberal Center for American Progress, said the important point in the IDA report is that there was no Saddam-al Qaeda operational link.

“The idea that the same people who attack on 9/11, that Saddam was connected to them, is not true,” Mr. Korb said. “There’s no doubt Saddam was involved with a lot of terrorist groups. A lot of them he used against his own people.”

I can’t wait to see Hayes attack Scarborough as a deceitful liberal blah-blah-blah. The Standard, if I’m not mistaken, goes to press today. Will he clap back? Steve vs. Rowan! Fight fight fight fight!