Yesterday, I wrote a diary arguing that focusing on the
legalese and minutia was playing the GOP's game. Today
Billmon sez it better than I can:
The GOP noise machine appears to be having some success with its smear Joe Wilson campaign -- if only because so many lefties are now talking about that and not about how many White House officials are going to be indicted along with Karl Rove.
. . . But this is precisely what Karl Rove wants us to do. I think he thinks demolishing Wilson and Plame is the key to his political survival. He's dead wrong about that -- Patrick Fitzgerald is the key to his survival. But to the extent that he can keep the focus on the Wilsons, he buys himself time and shores up his position with his base. And by helping keep the focus on the Wilsons, Left Blogostan helps him do that. . . . Nothing the Reptiles say about the Wilsons, and nothing we say in their defense, is going to change that. What's more, Left Blogostan doesn't have nearly enough collective firepower to protect them. Joe Biden and the Republocrats aren't even going to try. So it's really up to the corporate press to decide whether it will let itself be used, once again, as Rove's political vegomatic (It slices! dices! grates! etc.)
. . . But it's even worse than that. By defending the Wilsons, Left Blogostan simply helps Right Blogostan keep the focus off of Rove and his White House dirty tricks operation. It boggles the mind that more than a year after Fitzpatrick subpoened the records of the "White House Iraq Group," and nearly a week after the Newsweek story highlighted the obvious connection between Plame's outing and the administration's WMD disinformation campaign, virtually nothing about this shadowy committee has appeared in the mainstream press. If Left Blogostan can do anything useful here, it will be to urge (we're not strong enough to intimidate) the corporate media to keep the focus on Rove, and to point the direction we think they should be going to develop the larger story.
What he said.
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