Right eye blind

General rule: When a series of events leaves you muttering "This could not have worked out better for Bush if Rove planned it that way" -- Rove planned it that way.

Case in point: "Rathergate." The propagandists are screaming that Burkett can be linked to Max Cleland and Kerry campaign bigwig Joe Lockhart. What do these mysterious "links" amount to? Not much.

Burkett is "linked" to Lockhart and Cleland only in the same sense that I can be "linked" to Farrah Fawcett, whom I once accidentally bumped into (though not slowly enough) a good many years ago. (Yes, I've used that comparison before. I may use it again. Sue me.) Burkett sent the documents to Cleland, who did not respond and as far as we know did not even see them. Cleland blew him off.

Anyone can send anything to anyone whose address is publicly known. Cleland is no more responsible for the things he receives in the mail than you are for the virii and spam that pop up in your email account.

Burkett did somehow bull his way into one (1) (as in "uno," "ein" "une," etc.) conversation with Lockhart, who says he did not know who Burkett was. He also says that Burkett just chewed his ear for a short while about Kerry's overly-soft campaign, which is pretty much what a lot of people wanted to scream into Lockhart's ear at that point. So far, I've seen not the slightest shred of evidence that the conversation amounted to anything else.

Republican hirelings love to use such tangential "connections" to create a scratch-n-sniff conspiracy where no conspiracy exists. We've seen these slime-ball tactics before. Remember the Whitewater pseudo-scandal?

For a good demonstration of how this brouhaha illustrates the principle of "left eye open, right eye blind," take a look at this comparison between the treatments accorded Fox and CBS. An excerpt:

With Outfoxed we have STRONG EVIDENCE of actual bias for Bush(The Moody memos), yet that never became a story to discuss everywhere for hour upon hour. Why?

Is it because it is a given that FoxNews is biased, so the Moody memos aren't important because they prove something everyone already knows? Is the standard lower for Fox? Maybe, but this is bullshit...