Keith Olbermann Questions The Timing

...and in a dishonest, cover-your-ass way to boot.

Basically Olbermann deliberately conflates two different timing-questions. One is relatively plausible. The other is absurd. But he drifts back and forth between suggesting each so that he is, in fact, suggesting Bush somehow got the British to move on suspects in a months-old investigation to coincide with the scary-important Connecticut primary. And yet, if he's called on it, he can always claim, "Oh dear no, I only meant the first conspiracy theory. The one that isn't over-the-moon insane.

The scam: Two different "interesting theories" floated out simultaneously-- and interchangeably.

1) That Bush and Cheney knew of the upcoming arrests, and so intensified their attacks on Democratic weakness on terrorism in the days before, so as to have maximum political advantage from it.

This is pretty dumb as it is -- Bush and Cheney are always complaining the Democrats are soft on terrorism, and Olbermann himself is always complaining about their complaints. So, for this theory to work at all, Olbermann has to suddenly forget the last three thousand times he's whined that Bush and Cheney are saying meeeeaan things about the Democrats' anti-terrorism credentials.

But fine. If Olbermann "forgets" that, this theory isn't entirely crazy. Actually, I'm not sure what's being suggested is blameworthy -- if one's political opponents are slamming surveillance and bank monitoring and you know that terrorists are about to be arrested due to information gathered from those techniques, well, why not make sure the public knows about it? Why not highlight their weakness on terrorism?

This is the more plausible question-the-timing theory. It could happen. I don't think it did happen, but it could.

The other theory is insane:

2) That Bush actually connived Blair into arresting these guys on trumped-up charges because he wanted to embarrass Ned Lamont. In this theory, the whole arrest is a conspiracy, a fabrication.

Read Olbermann's remarks. Notice how he sometimes speaks as if he means Conspiracy 1 but then begins talking about Conspiracy 2. Putting Conspiracy 2 out there, and suggesting to the lunatics that it's quite likely, while retaining plausible deniability that he only meant to discuss Conspiracy 1.

What a tool.

PS: The leftist conspiracy media keeps repeating the silly shit that "Bush was on vacation during the final days of this investigation."

They never seem to mention that Tony Blair was on vacation in the Carribean during the final days of this investigation too, and yet that doesn't seem to have prevented the British intel/law-enforcement apparatus from making a lot of arrests.

Correction: I mistakenly wrote that Tony Blair had returned from his vacation a day or two before the arrests. I'm told by JackStraw he was still on vacation for the arrests, and in fact placed the call to Bush informing him of the mass arrests from the Carribean.

JackStraw only lied to me once -- "No, a lot of guys do this together, doesn't mean anything, just some good guy fun" -- so he has solid (if not completely untainted) credibility as far as I'm concerned.

posted by Ace at 01:01 PM

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