I'll apologize if anybody else has already come to this conclusion and I missed it. I did some quick searches and nothing seemed to resemble this, so I figured I'd go ahead.
When I read about Karl Rove's "combative" interview with NPR's Robert Siegel, I wasn't necessarily surprised. It just seemed like Rove being uber-Rovian. And, then on Friday, as I was wrapping up some work, there was Lynne Cheney snarling at Wolf Blitzer and CNN for being biased.
And then it occurred to me...
They're trying to pull a Bill Clinton. They're trying to do what Clinton did on Fox.
It's not secret that when Bill Clinton tore into Chris Wallace, he energized a lot of Democrats. It's fairly obvious that that's what he was trying to do.
Clinton showed Democrats how to fight. No, he showed them they NEEDED to fight. That one interview did a lot for the confidence of every Democrat running for office and every individual working to get another Democrat into office. Just like when Murtha came out firing on Iraq, Bill Clinton's interview with Chris Wallace was a defining moment of this election cycle.
Rove and Cheney's combative interviews were not just random events. They were a sad attempt at copycatting Bill Clinton, a pathetic effort at energizing the 101st keyboardists and the Dobson-style fundies.
But they were more than that. They were also an attempt to re-energize the "liberal media" meme, to generate new stories about the media's alleged liberal bias, and to do it in a frame of an election: "The Liberal Media is trying to give the Democrats the election."
I'm willing to bet we'll see some more of this over the next few days. We're onto you, turd blossom.