Politics? In Terror Alert!™s? Inconceivable!
So.
- Maximum Leader Genius had his flying monkeys announce in a press release that there was Going! To! Be! A! Terror! Attack! Any! Day! Now! (and, for a change, listing some actual targets instead of frantically handwaving and shouting Osama bin Laden! Osama bin Laden! like some sort of upper class escapee from the insane asylum)
- Howard Dean made comments about how funny it was that these Terror! Alert!™s only happened at times when things were politically bad for Maximum Leader Genius (like the thursday announcement of the Sunday capture of an Al Qaeda bigwig, just in time to try and override John Kerry's acceptance speech at the Democratic convention). Funnily enough, this Terror! Alert!™ happened about the same time a few polls came out saying that John Kerry got a bump of about 10 points post-convention.
- Yet more flying monkeys went into shrieking tizzies that Howard Dean was suspecting the worst of Beloved Leader.
- A day later, the teeny details come out that this Terror! Alert!™ was based on evidence three or four years old. And that, um, there wasn't any evidence that any of the activities described in these documents (that, in case you were wondering, predated the destruction of the World Trade Center) was currently underway.
But that's okay. The SCLM (™ Atrios, et al.) managed to gin up a poll that showed that the presidental candidate who didn't go AWOL lost ground after the Democratic convention, so I guess the Terror! Alert!™ is safely over.
I don't really expect that the SCLM will ever bother to apologise to Howard Dean, either. They've not apologised for any of their other smears, so why would they break their winning streak now?