"I'll Show You The Classified Document!"

The Right likes to make a big deal about how the news media routinely reveals classified information which undermines the war effort. I could probably find a thousand stories written by conservative bloggers in the last month with this very storyline. When one of their own does it, however, they grow strangely silent.

Greg Sargent noticed something very interesting while watching the quixotic Rick Santorum try to convince everybody that "We found WMD in Iraq" when the "WMD" in question were 20 year-old forgotten sarin gas shells found buried on the Iranian border that wouldn't cause anything more than a rug burn or a headache (Weapons of Minor Discomfort):

In his interview on Fox, Santorum brandished a document and said the following:

"I'll show you the classified documents right here. And it says that in fact that there are assessed that there are additional weapons that we need to find. I can't go into the details. It's in the classified portion." (Emphasis added.)

It's a crime to even bring a classified document out of its holding place and into an interview room, let alone brandishing it on camera for the entire viewing public to see. You can't even make a copy of a classified document. You can see the video of this right here.

It's beyond laughable that the conservosphere gets their panties all in a twist about news organizations that supposedly reveal classified information (except for conservative news organizations like The Wall Street Journal), when here we have a US Senator holding a classified document up to a TV camera, and nary a peep from the peanut gallery.

UPDATE: George Bush's chief weapons inspector David Kay calls Santorum "...wrong as to the facts and exaggerated beyond all reason." You might also want to slip "breaker of federal laws" in there.