I'm quoting a message board
post at Democratic Underground by DrBB from today:
The number one strategy for dealing with blow-ups like this has never been refutation; it has always been "muddying the waters."
It's simple, really. The assumption is that Americans are simple-minded boobs, and only clear-cut, black-and-white arguments and evidence can penetrate their video-game-and-junk-food-addled brains. Therefore, whenever there is a nice, clear-cut issue like this that the other side can use against you, all you have to do is spin the props and kick up enough sand to make things complicated. "Yeah, well Wilson's wife was CIA," being the classic example. Nothing to do with the substance of the charges, just a way of introducing noise into the system. Even the outing of his wife just draws the discussion into back lanes and biways. Outing her was itself a bit of a misstep, perhaps, but handled the same way: just muddy the waters: Maybe it wasn't a crime, maybe maybe maybe.....
So the only hope for making something stick is for it to stay as clear-cut and focused as possible, over against the sludge they'll kick up to complicate things. They were trying to do it with the nonsense about O'Neill having used secret documents, but this is a thousand times better.
It puts you in the position of making precisely the arguments you made above, instead of being able to simply point to O'Neill for this stuff.
The information is still out there, and it still adds some weight to our side, but this blunts its impact considerably.
DrBB's "muddying the waters" point here about the administration is right on. I've given some consideration of this in the last few scandals. If you go back to the "16 Words" in the State of the Union address, there really could be no easier conclusion to draw from Bush's remarks: He lied us into war. But the waters got muddied, and even calling this affair the "16 Words" was part of the muddying process. Afterall, it was only 16 words! Of course if I come by your house and shout "Fire!" that's only one word, but it conveys my message fairly clearly. Be that as it may, the weasel weaseled away through muddy waters!
The same thing with the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson affair. If you pay really close attention to the way it works you can see it analytically, the spin, the emphases, the delays in news coming out, then the slant of the particular news organization mixed in with their their laziness quotient, then the press secretary obfuscations, then the guessing of pundits, then the story has gone a thousand directions. This along with a Republican Congress snoring away and what do you have? Muddied waters.
Now with O'Neill. There haven't been really any solid denials that I've heard, just a lot of twisting, turning, nuancing, and now backtracking, qualifying, regretting. In other words, the story is going quickly away from its initial simplicity through the whole process described above.
The White House is obviously a behind-the-scenes powerhouse. Who would doubt that the telephone lines have been burning up between the White House and Paul O'Neill? I have no inside records, but it's a virtual certainty that they've leaned on him, pleaded with him, browbeat him, and maybe even threatened him in some way. He might've thought 'I'm old and rich and they can't do anything to me,' but he probably doesn't think it now.
Here's what I believe: What he said at the first is true. What he says now is the result of twisting and browbeating. The Bush White House has bullied O'Neill into backtracking. They're mean and they're crooked, and before they get the waters too muddied, let's just say that much is still clear.