Viking Pundit and Best of the Web in a Vulcan mind-meld?

According to Blogmatcher, my blogmate is Howard Bashman’s How Appealing. And me without a law degree! But then I perused through Best of the Web today and, for not the first time, I found myself wondering if James Taranto is a big Viking Pundit fan. Here’s an excerpt from today’s BOTW:

Here's a mischievous thought: What if administration officials actually know where the weapons are, but are withholding the information? The idea would be to get the Bush-haters as far out on a limb as possible in their insistence that Bush lied and Saddam wasn't really so bad--then saw off the limb by revealing the weapons finds.
Don't get us wrong; we don't actually believe this. Our view is that the Bush administration is an unusually honest one, and there's no reason to think it was untruthful about either prewar intelligence or the postwar search for weapons. But the conspiracy-minded folks who are intent on discrediting the liberation of Iraq assume everything Bush says is a lie, so from their point of view, our little theory ought to be eminently plausible. We bring it up only because we relish the thought that it'll drive them crazy--or, we should say, even crazier than they already are.

And here’s a similar thought I made two months ago:

Now here's my prediction for the aftermath of Iraq: it will be maddening for the left-wingers in San Francisco and the New York Times to see free people in Baghdad cheering U.S. troops. So, then, the theory will be proposed that the U.S. war in Iraq will be illegitimate and a failure unless weapons of mass destruction are found. The pressure to find chemical and biological weapons will grow and grow and the enemies of Bush – driven more by personal animosity than principled opposition – will get louder and shriller until the attacks reach a critical mass. Then, only then, all will be revealed, and Bush will once again pull in the pot from those who bet against him and the United States.

GMTA