November Surprise

OK. I made up the Karl Rove/October Surprise part of my post on the Dow hitting 12,000. But it really isn't all that far-fetched, because Tom Englehart wrote a column for The Nation Tuesday about what he calls the November Surprise.

The US-backed special tribunal in Baghdad signalled Monday that it will likely delay a verdict in the first trial of Saddam Hussein to November 5. Why hasn't the mainstream media connected the dots between the Saddam's judgment day and the midterm elections?

A possible death-sentence for Saddam and his top lieutenants on November 5? Now, shouldn't that raise a few eyebrows somewhere? If you happen to have a calendar close at hand, pull it over and take a quick look. That verdict would then come, curiously enough, just two days before the midterm elections. It's the sort of thing that--you would think--that any reporter with knowledge of the US election cycle (no less of how Karl Rove has worked these last years) would at least note in an article. But no, you can search high and low without finding a reference to this in the mainstream media.

That the MSM hasn't "connected the dots" between Saddam's verdict day and our election day only says that the MSM hasn't completely gone over the cliff. Not like Englehart, who says he received a forwarded e-newsletter written by Scott Horton, an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Law School, as well as chairman of the International Law Committee at the New York City Bar Association. It was Horton, in his newsletter, who first raised the question of the timing.

I called Horton directly. Here's what he had to say when I asked whether he thought Karl Rove might have anything to do with this:

"For sure. That November 5 date is designed to show some progress in Iraq. This is the last full news-cycle day in the US before the elections. It'll be Monday. And the American public will see Saddam condemned to death and see it as a positive thing.

"This is not coincidence," he continued. "Nothing in Iraq that's set up this far in advance is coincidental."

Still, scheduling the announcement of what will almost certainly be a future execution to give yourself one last shot at a bump in the polls?

Welcome to Bushworld.

There you have it. To the people on the far-left, whenever something happens that's good for the Republicans, it's the evil, scheming Karl Rove behind it. Whether it's in Iraq or on Wall Street or at the gas pump, if it improves the polling results of the GOP, it's a nefarious plot to hang onto power at the expense of Truth, Justice and the American Way.