Saturday, May 13, 2006

White House Shoots Its Wad Too Early?

This article cross-posted at Daily Kos.

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While cruising around online Friday, looking for more information about the latest NSA scandal and the companies involved, I ran across a video clip of Tweety Matthews saying that he believed an indictment of Karl Rove would be forthcoming that day. (Sorry, can't find the link for the clip, but I believe it was somewhere on Crooks and Liars.) For those of you who were paying attention, it became obvious over the course of the day that this would not be the case.

Of course, we all now know that even Rove himself expects an indictment soon, and even went so far as to tell his boss about it, adding that he would resign his position immediately after the charges are publicly announced.

These two events seem unrelated, but it got me wondering...

In the past, whenever someone from BushCo's senior board of directors was about to be fingered for some immoral and/or illegal act, the standard White House strategy was, of course, to claim that Osama bin Laden was again peeking out of his hidey hole to leave cryptic messages about "death and destruction to the infidels." (That would appear to be us, from what I gather.

Some noted that these sudden messages were rather conveniently spaced to coincide with other events that might have otherwise gone bad for the the Republicans and, specifically, the White House - elections, indictments, revelations that there were no WMDs, badly chosen appointments...you know the drill. But few others took notice.

Initially, it was videotapes. After a while, it turned into audiotapes. Then they wouldn't let independent professionals analyze the tapes, choosing instead to have their own "professions" give them a look (or a listen) to determine whether or not they were authentic. Amazingly, they always turned out to be, according to those in-house professionals.

By that point, most people were saying, "Er... Hold on a second..." while looking at the timeline of events and their correlation to the release of these messages. People were getting suspicious, and it appears that someone at the White House may have noticed, choosing to dump the "bin Laden's gonna getcha" method for something a bit more radical.

(Author's note: Please note that, from this point on, this article is speculation on my part, quite possibly initiated by the intake of entirely too much caffeine. So feel free to take it with a grain of salt. Thank you. - DCF)

A lot of new, non-bin Laden-related revelations that have been popping up in the news lately seem to have been coinciding with other, less Bush-friendly ones. Let me give you an example of what I mean, if I may.

It was announced earlier in the week that Patrick Fitzgerald was going to meet with the grand jury to discuss Karl Rove's testimony Friday. Many were laying bets that Rove was going to be indicted under charges of perjury and lying to a grand jury, and the announcement was going to come Friday afternoon.

The previous day, USA Today published its article about the NSA collecting phone call information on "tens of millions of Americans" to create the world's largest database.

Had an announcement about charges against Rove come out Friday, it very likely would have received minimal coverage from the mainstream press, barely making it onto the front page, below all the ongoing stories about who the NSA is watching and why. Possibly, there might be an editorial or two, but not much else.

Keeping this in mind, I ask you to consider this: Is it possible that, assuming the White House thought they knew charges would be announced Friday, the "leak" of the NSA's newest "dirty little secret" was a pre-emptive strike against intense coverage of a Rove indictment announcement, an attempt to draw attention away from yet another White House monkey-boy getting busted for trying to cover up BushCo's shady dealings?

If this is the case, is it also possible that, once the White House allowed this leak, Fitzgerald realized the same thing and has decided to hold off a few more days, giving this newest scandal a little more time to settle in before dropping yet another bomb, thereby allowing it the coverage it deserves?

Or, more importantly, am I just talking out my ass about wildly ridiculous speculation based on little more than a lack of sleep and an excessive amount of sugar intake?!?

You make the call.

DCF

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