We all know how this works.
Two guys walk into a ring for a fight. One knows heâs about to get creamed. But he canât bear the shame and humiliation of walking away from a fight. So at the very last moment he whips out some phony claim that the other guyâs cheating.
He puffs himself up with forced indignation. And huffily storms off.
Everybody knows it was bogus — the accused, the accuser, everyone else. But it gives the coward just enough of an angle, just enough of a smokescreen to get out of the place without having a glove laid on him and with a bit of his dignity intact.
This is of course more or less exactly what the Republicans are doing with the hullabaloo over this unsent Democratic staff memo.
Precisely the same.
(The actual memo bears reading because, though Jay Rockefeller has said he never authorized it and it was never sent, it’s much more tame than the hyper-ventilating coverage would suggest. The ‘plot’ is essentially a plot to have a real investigation.)
As I said in this earlier post, the Republicans are trying to use this memo ridiculousness to shut down any scrutiny of the intelligence related bad-acts in the lead-up to the war.
And theyâre already starting. According to Newsmax, Newt Gingrich said yesterday that the president should refuse to cooperate with the committee altogether.
âI don’t see how the White House can cooperate with an intelligence committee which has this level of partisanship,â he told Sean Hannity on Thursday.
See where theyâre going with this?
