Am I overly suspicious

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Am I overly suspicious? Or is Matt Drudge taking his, shall we say, talking points directly from Karl Rove? Or maybe from Karl Rove, via Ed Gillespie, long-time GOP operative, money-shoveler and incoming chairman of the RNC? Drudge has an over-the-fold headline this evening which claims that there’s some sort of super smackdown brewing between Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean and DNC Chair Terry McAuliffe.

For all I know the two may hate each other, I have no idea. Dean has pissed a bunch of people off in DC.

But look at the key quote in Drudge’s ‘story’ about Dean’s alleged intention to fire McAuliffe.

“We’ll make a change there immediately [after the New Hampshire primary],” a top Dean source said of the DNC leadership. “I think it is important, as does Howard, to mark a new beginning, cut ties from the past.”

This ‘quotation’ suggests a pretty short list of possibilities. Either people in the Dean campaign are incredible morons or this is a bogus quote.

Why?

How exactly is Dean going to clean house after — presumably — winning the New Hampshire primary? Even though a presidential nominee controls the party apparatus after he gets the nomination, there are a number of reasons why they seldom install their own chairman at the DNC before even winning the presidency. But they certainly don’t — or rather can’t — fire the chairman of the party during the middle of the primary campaign.

Why?

Basically for the same reasons that I’ve so far refrained from firing New York Times Executive Editor Joe Lelyveld or the fact checker of Ann Coulter’s ridiculous new book Treason (of which we’ll be saying more soon): because I can’t.

Who really gave Drudge that ‘quote’?

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