They say "timing is everything in life."
You may remember that last year, Countdown did an investigation of the "coincidences" between raised terror alerts and bad news for the Bush administration. It was quite compelling. I just finished sending a request to Keith Olbermann to investigate the convenient timing of the Foley sex and cover-up scandal. The dKos community is so focused on this scandal (as are the other lefty blogs) that I believe we are failing to see the Foley for the trees. Yes, the cover-up may be bad for the House leadership in November. (That assumes, of course, that you believe we are going to have a "real" election this year.) What doesn't seem to be getting much play is the curious timing of the Foley revelations.
Foleygate 24/7 means we have not been paying much attention to the real and sometimes horrifying Bush administration stories of the past week.
In a week during which the news should have been about the following:
---At Bush's behest, Congress passes the most abhorrent law since Japanese internment in WWII, undoing 900 years of the right of habeas corpus and other Constitutional protections such as the right to confront witnesses, pardoning GWB retroactively for any crimes he and his may have committed;
---Part of a new NIE is published describing dismal prospects for the administration's "stay the course" occupation of Iraq;
---Woodward's book "State of Denial" comes out and he appears on 60 Minutes with damning tales of more White House mismanagement, squabbling and deception;
---Word leaks of a previously undisclosed "urgent" meeting initiated by Tenet during which he warned Condi Rice that intelligence pointed to an upcoming attack by al-Qaida on the US two months before 9/11, unrevealed to the 9/11 Commission and not taken seriously by Ms. Rice;
---Colin Powell states that he was asked to resign;
---Congress passes another insidious law to create an Israeli-like fence between the US and Mexico;
we are instead bombarded, for five days now, by news of a sex scandal and its cover-up by the House leadership. We know that they were aware of the allegations against Foley for at least 10-11 months and perhaps years, and yet somehow the story becomes public this Thursday. Why now? Who leaked the information to ABC News? What, if any, other scandals have been "placed" in the media by neo-con strategists to deflect news coverage from the true Bush agenda?
America loves a sex scandal. Corporate news media love a story that sells. The Republicans know this all too well. We know how good they are at manipulating the media. We know how fond the media is of protecting GWB. The question is how deep their control actually runs.
Is the left being played once again? I hope not. But, I'm afraid so. We should at least be thinking about it.