Vodkapundit ruminates on Peter Beinart’s blow up on the Hugh Hewitt show. Beinart lost his cool when pressed on the Berger theft. Vodkapundit claims this: "The Berger thefts are a window into the un-seriousness at the core of the Democratic Party where national security is concerned. They dare not let the Great Unwashed realize that simple truth, thus the panicky volume of the spin, and the silence of the anti-Bush press."

The New York Times reports that "Officials at the National Archives were so concerned about Samuel R. Berger’s removal of classified documents last year that they imposed new security measures governing the review of sensitive material, including the installation of full-time surveillance cameras."

And then there is this from the New York Sun (read the whole for the details): "In other words, according to the commission report, Mr. Berger was presented with plans to take action against the threat of Al Qaeda four separate times — Spring 1998, June 1999, December 1999, and August 2000. Each time, Mr. Berger was an obstacle to action. Had he been a little less reluctant to act, a little more open to taking pre-emptive action, maybe the 2,973 killed in the September 11, 2001, attacks would be alive today.

It really doesn’t matter now what was in the documents from the National Archives that Mr. Berger says he inadvertently misplaced. The evidence in the commission’s report yesterday is more than enough to embarrass him thoroughly.He is a hardworking, warm man with a wonderful family, but his background as a trade lawyer and his dovish, legalistic and political instincts made him, in retrospect,the tragically wrong man to be making national security decisions for America in wartime.That Senator Kerry had Mr. Berger as a campaign foreign policy adviser even before the archives scandal is enough to raise doubts about the senator’s judgment."

Martin Peretz also has a choice paragraph on the Berger matter, it begins thus: "I confess: I do not like Sandy Berger; and I have not liked him since the first time we met, long ago during the McGovern campaign, not because of his politics since I more or less shared them then, but for his hauteur. He clearly still has McGovernite politics, which means, in my mind, at least, that he believes there is no international dispute that can’t be solved by the U.S. walking away from it."