Reading through Bill Kauffman’s Ain’t My America, I’ve learned that John Randolph believed that with respect to his political opponents, “it is a mere waste of time to reason with such persons. They do not deserve anything like serious refutation. The proper arguments for such statesmen are a strait-waistcoat, a dark room, water, gruel, and depletion.”

This is probably good advice particularly for dealing with the deniers and fantasists who choose to ignore the fact that Saddam Hussein wasn’t in league with al Qaeda. I don’t know whether the Weekly Standard is running a Laurie Mylroie Contest for Weapons-Grade Conspiracy-Mongering or what, but somehow the delusion that the war was a good idea because Saddam was working with al Qaeda to plan an attack on us has cropped up again.

That said, with the passion of a younger man and the pen of a better writer, my friend Spencer Ackerman has taken up the cudgels on behalf of reality. Spencer apparently still has his files dealing with this topic; many of us threw ours away when it became plain that no self-respecting author would stand for the idea of a Saddam-al Qaeda axis.

Spencer takes aim at Stephen Hayes, the Lyndon LaRouche figure of the conspiracy cult. Here’s Spencer on the latest mumbo-jumbo from Hayes:

About as close as anything could come to linking Saddam to Al Qaeda was a memo from one Saddam’s intelligence services “written a decade before Operation Iraqi Freedom.” It says: “In a meeting in the Sudan we agreed to renew our relations with the Islamic Jihad Organization in Egypt.” That organization would eventually merge with Al Qaeda in the late 1990s, long after the apparent meeting in Sudan. It also says that for a time in the mid-1990s, Saddam and Al Qaeda had “indirect cooperation” by offering “training and motivation” to some of the same terror organizations in that country.

Out of this thin gruel, Hayes attempted to make a meal in the Standard’s pages this week. He lifted as many bullet points from the report as he could that, out of context, seemed to bolster his theory. He then went about attacking reporters who accurately wrote that the study found no direct connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Hayes tacitly promised his readers that history will ultimately vindicate him, writing that “as much as we have learned from this impressive collection of documents, it is only a fraction of what we will know in 10, 20 or 50 years.” And he expressed puzzlement that an administration with an obvious credibility problem had not “done anything to promote the study.”

It would be genuinely perplexing if an administration that has every possible interest (its legacy, its current popularity, the judgment of its most basic principles in history’s ledger) in advancing this argument simply refused to promote “facts” that help argue for their policy views. The most obvious explanation why they haven’t seems to be that they aren’t “facts”–that Stephen Hayes is cobbling together disparate pieces of raw intelligence to paint a picture that doesn’t represent reality. (Which would not be unprecedented in his corner of the political ring.) But other theories are hereby solicited.

Dispensing with Hayes, Spencer leaves us with this:

At the risk of belaboring the point, it should be obvious that if Saddam Hussein was as important to Al Qaeda as Hayes has erroneously and deliberately written for years, then Al Qaeda should be reeling years after the destruction of his regime. Instead, according to a mid-2007 warning from the National Counterterrorism Center, Al Qaeda is “Better Positioned to Strike the West.” Never once does Hayes, in all the thousands of words he has written on the “connection,” reckoned with this basic strategic problem. In essence, he asks every U.S. soldier and Marine in Iraq to be the last man to die for a debater’s point.

I wish I’d come up with that last line. If you’re wondering about what’s brewing in the danker corners of the conspiracy-mongering fever swamps, Spencer climbs down into the muck so you don’t have to. But it’s sad that we still have to have this discussion at all. We don’t give equal time to flat-earthers anymore.