Herding Sheep

President Bush was apparently one of the many watching his Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, refuse to answer questions this week before the Senate Judiciary Committee, making the whole illegal domestic wiretapping issue look that much worse. Even some of the regressive legislators are jumping ship on this issue, in this mid-term election year.

So W has decided to go back to the tried and true rightie playbook which guides him in crisis, the one that has served him well over the years, as well as such public service icons as Dick Cheney and Tom DeLay.

That book only has three chapters which cover variations on three tactics: Blame the Clintons, destroy the messenger, or scare the hell out of the sheep in the country. This time he realized that the first two would not meet the test (though his man Gonzales reminded us in the Senate hearings that there is precedent in the country's history for this broad use of presidential authority, citing the electronic surveillance conducted by the George Washington and Abraham Lincoln administrations among others), and realizing that the 9/11 shroud was wearing thin, he trotted out a retread of last June's story about a now 4 year old alleged plot to strike the L.A. area, apparently to scare us yet once more into "trusting him". I sincerely hope that for the sheep, this will be one wolf cry too many.

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