Originally Posted by roachboy

this article is from the washington times, which is hardly a neutral source.

here's an interpreation from a non-rightwing viewpoint:

i think the memo could well be a fake, but one concocted and planted by the political cadres within the bush administration.
it smells of rove. put your face close to the screen and i am sure that you too will catch a bit of the fetid smell of karl rove.
the idea would be to turn the schiavo farce to some kind of advantage for the right--it has not done well in the press, it is one of those moments across which the more authoritarian elements of right ideology come to the fore. the discourse around the schiavo case has been really quite repellent, and the level of hypocrisy perhaps evident enough for even conservatives who supported this kind of display to sense, perhaps, a problem.

when you have a fiasco at the tactical level, you can always try to plant something like this. planting it would have at least three main advantages:
it would make the problem the "mainstream press" and not the craven exploitation of a sad and ultimately ridiculous situation by the right:
it would play to the right's beloved victimization narrative;
it would function, ideally, to trivialize and displace the problem the right's own actions have presented to it.

you could see in the rather farce something of a model, in fact, but not as conservatives would like:

think about it: the problems raised by cowboy george's glorious history during vietnam is not in doubt--it was a problem during an election cycle--it would not go away, despite the constant slander generated by republican operatives like the swift boat charlatans--so you concoct a "smoking gun" and plant it--then you reveal the fact of the fraud, but not the source--and presto macho the issue shifts from the fact of george w bush's record of exploiting wealthy family connections to avoid going to vietnam (and this not on the basis of anything approaching a principled objection to the war) to the press that relays these facts.
if you manufacture enough structured indignation from the loyal brownshirts of the right, you can perform a wholesale forest-for-the-trees switch.
and why not, it worked pretty well, didnt it?

i mean, as loathesome as i find karl rove, you have to hand it to the guy: he is slick, in an odious kinda way. all the move required, really, was control over how it was framed--a breakdown in fact checking at the tv network is simply grist for the mill. and given the nature of rightwing land, it would have been secondary had the breakdown actually occurred. what matters is the aggressiveness of the accusations that it did occur, and a spineless television network.

but dont you find anything strange in how focussed the conservative attacks on rather were? where did that focus come from? would you need a trail of directives to prove that there was a centrally directed focus on particular aspects of the rather farce?

so you have something parallel here--and why not, it worked pretty well for the rove people last time out.

sick thing about this is that the above is no more or less probable an interpretation than any of those that take this story seriously.