Respectability

Josh Marshall temporarily leaves the bare-knuckled world of blogging for the lace doilies and fainting couches over at Time Magazine. At least he seems to consider Time readers a bunch of faint-hearts, because he goes out of his way to cushion them from the shock of this:

In these perilous days, we must be ready to think the unthinkable. No, I don't mean the possibility of a catastrophic terrorist attack. After 9/11, that's all too easy to imagine. No, I'm talking about a thought that even now seldom forces its way into respectable conversation: the quite reasonable suspicion that the Bush Administration orchestrates its terror alerts and arrests to goose the GOP's poll numbers.

Now, I'm a respectable columnist. I don't want to draw rolled eyes. But think about it.

I've been a reader of Marshall's stuff, on his blog and even before that, for years. He's a smart, principled guy. But if "respectable conversations" and "respectable columnists" are finding it difficult to mention aloud that Bush, Rove, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Gonzales (and, before him, Ashcroft) seem clearly to be manipulating terror alarms and arrests to fit their immediate political needs, then ol' Josh needs to start hanging out with more disreputable people, and fast.

In the non-respectable world where most Americans live, political manipulation of terror warnings by Bush, like the absence of WMDs in Iraq in 2002-2003, is pretty much taken as a given.

If, by "respectable" conversation," Marshall means not those of us out here who read Time, but rather the little group that ABC News' The Note refers to as "The Gang of 500"--the cabal people who write and publish Time, and Newsweek, and the Times, and the Post, and the network news, and appear on the weekend talking-head shows--then the matter of delicacy here is mainly about protecting them from the consequences of their own shoddy work over the last five years (lest, as Bob Somerby would point out, they get dropped from the invitation list for the right cocktail parties).

Rove's politics of fear is hardly breaking news. Last fall, Keith Olbermann documented 13 instances of terror alerts or arrest announcements following a step behind some bit of bad news for the GOP or good news for the Democrats between 2002 and 2005.

What would indeed be breaking news would be if Time Magazine, et al., decided to cover this pattern as a genuine news story.

But back to Olbermann's 13 documented instances. Coincidence? Thirteen cases of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy? Maybe. There's certainly an easy enough way to tell:

If it's not a coincidence, then the Bush administration will announce a terror threat or a foiled plot (however dubious it appears after a few days) within a few days of the November 7th general election. Probably the chronology will indicate it's information they've been sitting on for weeks and months, and there'll be no obvious reason why they made the announcement then--other than the possibility of influencing the election at the last minute, which, of course, no respectable columnist would say aloud.

If you want to go double-or-nothing, consider the same possibility in the days before the Democratic primary in Connecticut on August 8, to give a little momentum to Bush's favorite Democrat, Joe Lieberman.

Any takers?

[Cross-posted at Preemptive Karma.]