WASHINGTON, DC - Okay, it’s true. I admit it. The irresistibly obvious pun in the headline is driving the content of this Capital Ideas. But who can resist the delicious justice of this moment: the New York Times’ egregious executive editor Howell Raines being brought low by a new form of media. No, not talk radio, but the Internet; specifically the “bloggers” who kept a relentless spotlight on the degradation of the Times under Raines’s leadership. Consider this the Internet’s Woodward-Bernstein moment, this time bringing down a previously unassailable liberal institution.

The Times has always been a liberal paper, but under Raines it became a bad liberal paper. This is merely symptomatic of the condition of liberalism today. Chaos at the Times reflects the deepening chaos on the Left. And no variation of chaos theory can point a way out. Instead, watch for the Left to lose its head completely.

Consider the main fixation of the Left this week: whether the Bush administration deliberately falsified intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. It may well be that pre-war intelligence was faulty; our intelligence services have, over the years, not especially distinguished themselves for, um, their intelligence. If, in fact, few or no WMDs are found in Iraq, it will more likely turn out to be an example of Uhlmann’s Razor (after our friend Mike Uhlmann) at work: If stupidity can explain a bureaucratic action, it is not necessary to search for an alternate explanation.

But it raises an interesting question that so far has gone unasked: If Saddam Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, then why did he risk the destruction of his regime by refusing access to the U.N. weapons inspectors? One compelling explanation is that Hussein couldn’t take the risk of opening up his country to U.N. inspectors because of what else they might find, such as, oh, mass graves and torture chambers.

It is the nature of closed regimes that they can’t stand the bright light of scrutiny. There are stories out of North Korea this week that starvation is so bad that cannibalism is becoming rampant. So while prudent people can argue about whether it served U.S. interests to have invaded Iraq, no one can really say that we misjudged the nature of the regime there.

Speaking of weapons of mass destruction, there are two of them currently wreaking devastation on the Democratic Party -- the Clintons. For months Democrats have been complaining that the Clintons are “sucking the air out of the room” for other would-be national candidates in the party. So what does Hillary say in her new book about being told of her husband’s infidelities? That she was “gasping for air.” Maybe now she understands how her party feels. Maybe -- but party chaos serves her purposes. At least in theory.