NP: Stereophonics, Language. Sex. Violence. Other?

As I'm belatedly getting to the the expected vitriolic response from the left to Karl Rove's comments last week, I only just saw some poll numbers from right after 9/11 on Daily Kos that are ostensibly being used to show Rove is out to lunch.

Except they're not, really. It reminded me immediately of something I saw on Washington Monthly last week about an L.A. Times -- yes, I know, very meta -- about this idea of manufacturing uncertainty. Kevin Drum is talking more about things like environmental regulations, but it extends to the Iraq and related matters as well in a very simple way.

It's the weatherman thing all over again. Loopholes upon loopholes upon loopholes, and the semantic difference between technically being correct and actually being right. Yes, some liberals circulated a petition calling for restraint after 9/11, therefore Rove's blanket statement that liberals did this is not demonstrably false. Even the poll numbers show 20% or so of Democrats who didn't support the war with the Taliban. So it's not untrue to say Democrats didn't want to go to war, with the convenient omission that it was a small percentage, and that a small percentage of Republicans didn't want to, either.

The point being not that Rove is in any way right, just that he's still really, really smart, and wouldn't put himself into an indefensible position. All they need is to be able to show that the opposite of what they claim isn't 100% proven -- evolution is another good example -- and they can get their version of events into the debate. It's sort of a mutation of reasonable doubt in law, except without, in many cases, the reasonable part. But reasonability or the lack thereof doesn't seem to be a barrier to media coverage of that contrary point of view, and don't think the GOP doesn't know it.

Where it's starting to break down, though, is the "we didn't mean Democrats, we meant liberals" part, which strains credibility a little more than usual. This could be part and parcel of the Bush White House's uncanny ability to overreach since about two seconds into his second term.