No Smoking Gun

Some great lines in an editorial about the Downing Street Memo by Michael Kinsley, today:

Developing a paranoid theory and promoting it to the very edge of national respectability takes a certain amount of ideological self-confidence. It takes a critical mass of citizens with extreme views and the time and energy to obsess about them. It takes a promotional infrastructure and the widely shared self-discipline to settle on a story line, disseminate it and stick to it.

Kinsley focusses only on the hearsay nature of this evidence: the memo is a summary of a discussion of C's impressions of the impressions of others of Bush's possible attitude. But Kinsley still accepts the weird and illiterate interpretation of the word "fixed" to mean "changed."