Digby got there before me, so I can make this short.
Monitoring mosques and Muslim areas for radioactivity, whether illegally or not, is a kind of spying which most Americans will approve of. Besides everything else, radiation monitoring is less intrusive than clandestine burglaries, electronic eavesdropping, or monitoring phone conversions.
Digby believes that the “leak” of information about this particular activity was engineered by Karl Rove, and I think he’s right. Of all the forms of illegal surveillance that there are, this is the least offensive, and the Rove team wants to make it the public face of the illegal NSA program .
Reasonable conservatives know that the real issues are quite different, but reasonable conservatives are not a significant voting bloc. The Bush-Rove team plans to win the battle for public opinion on this issue, and the Democratic Party’s historical failure or refusal to capitalize on Republican outrages tells us that it is entirely possible that once the dust has settled, Bush will not have been hurt at all.
UPDATE:
Media Matters has posted a 5,000-word piece on the Republican spin machine’s work on this issue: Top 12 media myths and falsehoods on the Bush administration’s spying scandal. This piece is a MUST READ.
It’s amazing how much disinformation they’ve succeeded in disseminating in a few days. These people are not going to give up, no matter what. Long ago Bush went beyond what any “honest conservative” could possibly support, but we’re not fighting against honest conservatives. We’re fighting against fanatics and paid operatives.
Players so far (listed at MM) include the LA Times, Brit Hume, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Bay Buchanan, Matt Drudge, Kelly O’Donnell of NBC, Chris Matthews, Katie Couric, Brian Todd of CNN, Byron York and Rich Lowry of the National Review, Charles Krauthammer, Victoria Toensing on CNN, Newsmax, G. Gordon Liddy, John Fund of the Wall Street Journal, and William Kristol. Some of these people may be honestly mistaken, or hapless dupes, but the great majority of them are ideologues and operatives.
