Did Rove and Company Throw the 2006 Election?

Who the hell knows? It's possible.

As we have seen, anything is possible, when it comes to the Imperial White House of today and their enablers, co-conspirators or whatever name one wants to call them.

I fashoined my tin-foil hat into a Revolutionary War, Admiral's hat, (or was that Commandant, back then?), quite a few months back; right about the time I recognized the political and spiritual season in which we currently find ourselves.

Some interesting statements by our pals over the Lantern: http://lanternbrigade.blogspot.com


Bush and Rove Blew the Election on Purpose? Asks Will Bunch of The Philadelphia Daily News, while admitting it's a "tin-foil hat" conspiracy theory.

But after a few drinks, you may start to wonder about it. How else to explain, for example, not firing Rumsfeld sooner? By Greg Mitchell (November 12, 2006) -- He might have been kidding, but the more you read and think about it, the more it provides a plausible explanation for the wholesale White House bungling in the closing weeks of this year’s campaign: Bush and Rove blew the midterms on purpose. How else to accept that the normally hapless Democrats not only won, but as the president put it, “thumped”?Okay, even reporter/blogger Will Bunch of The Philadelphia Daily News, who concocted the idea -- likening it to “The Producers” plot to engineer a flop -- revealed that he had to put on his tin-foil hat first. I admit, I still don’t believe it one bit.
CM8ShowAd("Middle");

But the alternative view is just as chilling: that many, if not most, of our Washington-based pundits are even more out of it than we’d guessed. How else to explain their embrace of Karl Rove-as-tactical-genius for all these years? Either they were embarrassingly wrong or ... as Bunch hints ... maybe all too correct?Why blow the election? Go to Bunch’s blog for the full explanation, but it largely boils down to Iraq -- and the opportunity to make this a bipartisan problem as the catastrophe worsens in the months ahead. That desire, at least, is not farfetched, even if the conspiracy theory itself is a joke. I'm reminded of a Mike Peters editorial cartoon this week that offered a new twist on Colin Powell's "Pottery Barn" principle: It showed a broken pot, labeled Iraq, with Bush pointing to a Democratic donkey and saying, "I broke it ... you own it."

Anyway, throw down a couple of tequila shots, and then, for fun and a little head-spinning, consider Bunch’s evidence for his provocative conspiracy scenario.

He even asks: Why were the exit polls correct this time? Surely that proves ... something. --

Why didn’t Bush fire Rumsfeld sooner (as members of his own party are now howling)? And, just as bad, endorse him on the eve of the election, a move certain to cost his party many seats in the House?--

Why did he allow Cheney, again on the eve of the election, to say that not only was it still stay-the-course in Iraq, it was, in fact, "full speed ahead?"-- Why was there no true October or November surprise? Was the conspiracy to lose the election the true "surprise?" -- Given Bush's unpopularity, why was he sent to campaign in places where he did more harm than good and, as Bunch asks, “why did the White House suddenly make the president more visible by having more press conferences -- and thus taking more hostile questions on Iraq and other unpleasant subjects -- than at any other time in his six-year presidency?”--

Why, surprisingly, did incumbents Conrad Burns and George Allen fail to ask for recounts when they lost narrow races -- throwing the Senate to the Democrats without a whimper?--

Why did Rove toss resources into hopeless Senate races in such blue states as New Jersey and Pennsylvania while allowing Montana and Virginia to slip away?--

Why did Bush’s Justice Dept. go after vulnerable Rep. Curt Weldon in the final weeks -- and how is it that a Republican source first leaked the Rep. Mark Foley scandal? The GOP lost both seats, of course. I would add two more suspicious occurences:

Why did so many conservative commentators, such as Joe Scarborough, say near the end that the Republicans “deserved” to lose power? And what happened to the Diebold vote-counting fears? Maybe Rove did “fix” the election -- but in the Democrats’ direction, so that’s why they have stopped complaining about Diebold.

As Ann Coulter put it, "History was made this week! For the first time in four election cycles, Democrats are not attacking the Diebold Corp. the day after the election." Maybe the smoking gun in this conspiracy will be a memo from Rove to George Allen suggesting that he utter the word "macaca" whenever some dark-skinned ethnic ticks him off. Or a Ken Mehlman note to Tony Snow urging that he refer to the Mark Foley scandal as nothing but a bunch of "naughty e-mails."

Will Bunch concludes his blog post today: “Is Karl Rove not the evil genius we all thought he was, or is he brilliant beyond the reckoning power of us mere mortals? Whatever the strategery, the more we look at it, the more we think that Bush's difficult next two years may work out slightly better for him with a Democratic Congress.”Preposterous, I know. I'm still not buying it. The more likely explanation: Even evil “geniuses” screw up -- if they were "geniuses" to start with. And, as I've been saying for three years, the public hates the war far more than the pundits and newspaper editorialists admit. Americans want out. And no one should need a tin hat to see that.

Americans never wanted in, until they were coaxed with lies, terrorized with visions of mushroom clouds rising over American cities and whipped up to a fever pitch of false-patriotism and vengence-seeking by the Liars-in-chief, who insisted, against all evidence and common sense to the contrary, that Saddam and Osama were partners in the attempted castration of America, or so it would seem, and maybe tennis partners at the Tehran country club.

Is anything as it appears anymore? Just wondering......