9/07/2006

Help Follow the Bouncing Meme: Plame Caused the Katrina Debacle?:
So this morning, the Rude Pundit was flippin' between the O'Brien-licious CNN's American Morning and the Fox "News" morning show Fox and Friends with vagina dentata E.D. Hill and the deeply closeted Steve Doocy. On Fox, the Rude Pundit hears the Larry of the trio of hosts, Brian Kilmeade (which is close to an anagram for "kill me dead"), talking about ABC's lying, Bush-fellating piece o' crap TV movie about the Path to 9/11. Kilmeade offered that if, as the movie purports (and the 9/11 commission report says is wrong), that Bill Clinton was distracted from getting Osama Bin Laden because of the Lewinsky nonsense, then obviously the Bush adminstration is blameless for the Katrina nightmare because it was distracted by the Plame investigation, which now, of course, for Kilmeade and the right, is discredited completely by Richard Armitage's confession of loose lips.

What the fuck? the Rude Pundit thought. Is this some new talking point? For, surely, the Fox morning tools are not capable of thinking of such a thing on the fly.

So he went to the warm embrace of Google and Nexis and started a-searchin'. So far, here's what he's come up with: the meme seems to have started with James Taranto in his Wall Street Journal "Best of the Web" column on August 28. In the middle of "people who suffered" because of the investigation (and, of course, blaming Joe Wilson for everything), Taranto chortles, "Innocent White House officials were distracted from serving the country in order to participate in the investigation, which was in full swing a year ago when Hurricane Katrina struck." Over in Right Blogsylvania, it was picked up by Cliff May at the National Review Online (motto: "We may be irrelevant, but we're loud").

Has anyone heard this elsewhere? Is it spreading or dying as quickly as the sales of each of the Fox and Friends hosts' books?