The Dogs That DIDN'T Bark

Will Bunch has a reputation as a sober, realistic, reliable sort of fellow, much admired by Atrios and others.

So it was with considerable (albeit subtle) pleasure that I read his post-mortem on the recently concluded federal elections: Tin-foil hat time: Were Bush and Rove "The Producers" of an intentional flop?

Something of the same sort of thoughts came to me, too. There was and is so much shit surrounding the Busheviks, their politics and policies, their actions and deeds, that it had become impingent upon them to find some way to share the burden of their guilt. And what better a way to do so than to FORCE responsibility upon the Democrats by effectively conceding the Congress to them and saddling them with the necessity of cleaning up the mess?

Regard Bunch:

...The exit polls that leaked out in the late afternoon ended up matching the final results almost exactly -- nothing like what happened in those other Bush-era elections. The razor-close races all broke late for the Democrats, unlike Florida in 2000 or Ohio in 2004...and when that happened, there were no major charges of fraud, no "Brooks Brothers Riot," and no demand for a recount. The last two losers -- Conrad Burns of Montana and George Allen of Virginia -- went quietly into the autumn night, despite relatively close vote tallies. There appear to be no other Rovian stunts, like calling in the GOP's chits with Joe Lieberman to get him to caucus with the Senate Republicans.

And there was no October surprise, not in Iran and not back home.

And we thought most of these things before Bush's makes-no-sense-at-all handling of the Rumsfeld matter. We don't think a pre-election firing of Rumsfeld would have changed many voters' mind, but what if had changed just 1 percent. Burns and Allen (heh) would be returning to the Senate, and the GOP would at least control one house. Likewise, a lot of nailbiters like Rep.-elect Patrick Murphy's win in Bucks County would have gone the other way if Rumsfeld had been canned a week sooner.

All this is a long prelude to our thinking the unthinkable.

Is Karl Rove even more of an evil genuis than we think? Did he and Bush just produce an election flop...on purpose?

It sounds completely off-the-wall, and before this post is over we'll give some good reasons why they wouldn't do that. But we'll also give you a couple of good reasons why life could be better for the Bush White House and the future presidential ambitions of the GOP with the Dems running Congress.

I commend this piece, especially because the "good reasons why they wouldn't do that" aren't any more convincing than the evidence which Bunch adduces to support it.