Karl Rove must be particularly enjoying himself today. Having a good laugh over another successful "rat fucking" and getting away with it. Probably lighting a cigar at the news of the CBS firings, but more so over the media's coverage of the whole thing. Steve Soto sums it up well:
"Rove is a happy guy because the fiasco has all the marks of a typical Rove effort to neuter a Bush weakness. He has done this before with the successful effort to destroy J. H. Hatfield over his book "Fortunate Son," where Rove planted damaging information with Hatfield and then destroyed the author's credibility by making sure the media found out about Hatfield's criminal past. Once the media focused on Hatfield's past, it served to take off the table the actual allegations about Bush's own background.
This National Guard story has all the same markings as the earlier Rove effort. A troubling story about Bush's failure to meet the conditions of his tenure in the Guard begins to gain traction, so Rove plants false memos which accurately reflect the already-established concerns of some of Bush's superiors with a gullible and sloppy network that the Bush family already thinks is against them. In their rush to get their exclusive, Dan Rather and the segment's producers go with a story and somehow immediately the right-wing blogosphere has its talking points about the font types and spacing of the memos while the segment is still airing that night. Suddenly, the story shifts from the content of the memos (which to this day is still damaging and never addressed by Bush) to the layout and appearance of the memos. And then the Mighty Wurlitzer, right on cue, swings into action sucking the oxygen out of successive news cycles about media bias and the hatchet job that CBS is doing to poor Mr. Bush.
And don't forget that the whole episode led to something more beneficial to Rove: in the aftermath of the fiasco, CBS scrapped plans to air a segment on "60 Minutes" that documents how the administration lied to get its war in Iraq."
http://www.theleftcoaster.com/
And how it was done:
"Burkett said Ramirez told him she had seen him the previous month in an appearance on the MSNBC program Hardball, discussing the controversy over whether Bush fulfilled all his obligations for service in the Texas Air Guard during the early 1970s. "There is something I have that I want to make sure gets out," he quoted her as saying.
He said Ramirez claimed to possess Killian's "correspondence file," which would prove Burkett's allegations that Bush had problems as a Guard fighter pilot.
Burkett said he arranged to get the documents during a trip to Houston for a livestock show in March. But instead of being met at the show by Ramirez, he was approached by a man who asked for Burkett, handed him an envelope and quickly left, Burkett recounted.
"I didn't even ask any questions," Burkett said. "Should I have? Yes. Maybe I was duped. I never really even considered that.""
http://tinyurl.com/4x67r