It is clear that Rove's plan for the Republican campaigns depends on the majority of citizens and voters believing that there is a "clear and present" danger to the United States against which only the Republicans are likely to be successful. Boiled down to its core, that's what the election of 2006 is all about ... or at least that's what's going to dominate the news and the punditry for the next four months. We think it's time be done with Rove, once and for all! The best way to do that before 2008 is to humiliate him at the polls.
One of the Rove strategies is to cry "wolf" at any pretext. The assault on the New York Times, (which we explained a few days ago is a deliberate and transparent set-up inadvertently revealed by the Wall Street Journal in their own editorial!), is but a tactic in this over-all strategy. It is always good to impugn the word of an adversary, even one which has carried your lunch for a while, for in the case of the NYT, it remains "the newspaper of record" and "the news the right loves to hate."