Hmm. A break-in story. What a coincidence. Let's take a closer look (more in extended section below):
Burglars broke into state Bush-Cheney '04 headquarters in Bellevue early yesterday and stole three laptop computers containing campaign plans. State Republican Chairman Chris Vance quickly issued a statement declaring that it "looks like one of several deliberate attempts to disrupt the re-election campaign."
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/193493_burglary02.html
And now, read this from The Atlantic Monthly, about one of Rove's dirty tricks from a 1986 campaign:
The race is legendary in Texas political lore for Rove's discovery that his office was bugged--news of which, coincidentally or not, distracted attention from an evening debate in which his candidate was expected to fare poorly.
The bugs, when analyzed, showed the batteries had been on for an hour or so. Rove likely planted them himself and then called the cops. And notice the timing around scheduled debates.
And then there's this, from the same article, on another Rove campaign a decade later:
A typical instance occurred in the hard-fought 1996 race for a seat on the Alabama Supreme Court between Rove's client, Harold See, then a University of Alabama law professor, and the Democratic incumbent, Kenneth Ingram. According to someone who worked for him, Rove, dissatisfied with the campaign's progress, had flyers printed up--absent any trace of who was behind them--viciously attacking See and his family... The ploy left Rove's opponent at a loss. Ingram's staff realized that it would be fruitless to try to persuade the public that the See campaign was attacking its own candidate in order "to create a backlash against the Democrat," as Joe Perkins, who worked for Ingram, put it to me. Presumably the public would believe that Democrats were spreading terrible rumors about See and his family.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200411/green
Is this "break-in" another self-inflicted act, attempting to deflect from Bush's lousy flopsweat debate performance the other night? And to kick up some helpfully obscuring dust before the next debate rolls around?
Inquiring minds want to know...