Bush: DeLay Innocent Despite Evidence - Sound Familiar?

White House Challenges DeLay Allegations Ahead of Probe - Yahoo! News

"The White House stepped up its defense of embattled Rep. Tom DeLay on Sunday, disputing the merit of ethics allegations against the House majority leader ahead of an expected congressional probe."

This says to me that the White House feels they can "run out the clock" on DeLay. There's some decent history supporting that stance; 9/11 comes to mind immediately.

After 9/11, Bush and Cheney knew there was embarassing evidence they were asleep at the switch (Bin Laden Determined to Attack Within US and 60 other explicit warnings ignored by Bush.) So how did they play it?

Oppose a commission and drag feet on anything 9/11 related (except anything giving them power, such as the "Patriot" act.) When the Mild Right started wondering if they were maybe hiding something, they caved on the commission.

As the investigation, hearing, and the feeble corporate media dribbled each astonishing example of incompetence, Rove and Dick would deny, deny, deny. Fox and Friends would lie, lie, lie.

And so it went... until the election finally rolled around in November. BushCo had successfully pulled off the "frog in slowly heated pot" defense. The worshippers of Dear Leader refuse to believe the results of the investigation. The dull Mild Right heard nothing from Fox and Friends.

The moderates had been presented the evidence piece at a time, and the media was careful to present both sides equally: the truth on the one hand (Bush on vacation, ignoring the PDB,) and rightwingnuttia noise on the other (lies about the PDB: it was "historical", it was vague; there was no actionable intelligence, no one had thought about crashing planes into buildings, etc.)

All the while, the left was constantly portayed as conspiracy junkies or traitors. Mix all of it together, and there is no moment of clarity for the average citizen to be outraged about such a catastrophic failure.

Rove really does have spin down to an artform. Had this happened on Clinton's watch, Hyde, Lott, Hannity, and Limbaugh would have screeched so long and so hard that successful impeachment would probably have resulted.

Instead, America knew somebody blew it and the evidence was somewhere in the middle of the room. But the Rove Treatment calls for throwing pounds of shit on top of it. By the time anyone bothers to dig through it, no one wants to deal with the smell anymore.