October Surprises

[billroper]

While everyone has been worried about the October Surprise that Karl Rove is supposed to pull out of his magic hat, none has appeared -- thus far. (Don't want to take for granted the possibility that he might still have something up his sleeve, you know.)

However, it appears that an October Surprise was concocted by CBS News and The New York Times and originally intended to hit the airwaves at 7 PM EST on Sunday, less than 36 hours before the election. I write, as you're no doubt aware, of this story of missing explosives at al Qaqaa which was instead published on Monday as the story was starting to leak out. (Or as CBS said, the story wouldn't "hold" until the following Sunday.)

Given the speed with which Senator Kerry recorded and launched a TV commercial to hammer Bush on the subject, I would suspect that he or his campaign might have known about the article in advance of publication, but that would simply be suspicion on my part. I have no proof.

Now, the country -- and the various news organizations -- are engaged in investigating this story, trying to determine whether the explosives were at al Qaqaa at the time of the Iraq invasion or whether they had already been moved out as this article from the Washington Post or this Reuters article quoting ABC News suggest.

Of course, it's Thursday now. If CBS had broken the story on Halloween on 60 Minutes as they'd intended, the election would be over by now.

Wouldn't that have been a shame?

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

"Given the speed with which Senator Kerry recorded and launched a TV commercial to hammer Bush on the subject, I would suspect that he or his campaign might have known about the article in advance of publication, but that would simply be suspicion on my part. I have no proof."

I really doubt it. It looked like a quick reaction to me. (If he did have advance notice, I would have expected a better put together commercial...for one.)

B

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

The Democrats said the same thing about the speed with which the CBS/faked memo broke on the conservative blogs. Ho hum.

K.

[billroper]

Quite possibly. Of course, a well put together commercial would have been really suspicious. :)

[patoadam]

I'm surprised Kerry hasn't said more about the theft of nuclear materials from Iraq's reactor sites. This includes the theft of equipment that can be used to enrich uranium, for use either in nuclear reactors or atomic weapons. Also see the (revised) second-to-last verse of "The Osama bin Laden Happy Dance".