I think Shodan missed the point that the allegations in the forged memo were true and, just as they did with Lewinsky etc., GOP operatives managed to divert the media onto a less relevant sideshow.
I still think it’s likely that Karl Rove, or one of his fans, was responsible for the forged memo. With Google, I see that someone else has the same suspicion. I find it very sad that this thug was one of the country’s chief policymakers for eight years, considering the bullets on his resume:
[ul]
[li] In the 1996 Alabama Supreme Court race between Democratic incumbent Kenneth Ingram and Republican challenger Harold See, Rove printed anonymous fliers attacking See, his own client. The purpose was “‘to create a backlash against the Democrat,’ as Joe Perkins, who worked for Ingram, put it to me,” Green writes. “Presumably the public would believe that Democrats were spreading terrible rumors about See and his family. … The ploy left Rove’s opponent at a loss. Ingram’s staff realized that it would be fruitless to try to persuade the public that the See campaign was attacking its own candidate.”[/li][li] Rove’s slimiest moment came in 1994, when See first ran for the Supreme Court in Alabama against Democratic incumbent Mark Kennedy, who had just served a term as president of the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect. Kennedy’s commercials highlighted his volunteer work - and included one that showed him holding hands with children - so Rove started a whispering campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile, Green writes. “What Rove does is try and make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship,” explained Perkins. [/li][li] In 1970, College Republican Rove stole letterhead from the Illinois Democratic campaign of Alan Dixon, and used it to invite hundreds of people to Dixon’s new headquarters opening, promising free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing, disrupting the event.[/li][li] When Rove advised on George W. Bush’s 1994 race for governor of Texas against Democratic incumbent Ann Richards, a persistent whisper campaign in conservative East Texas wrongly suggested that Richards was a lesbian. According to Texas journalist Lou Dubose: “No one ever traced the character assassination to Rove. Yet no one doubts that Rove was behind it. It’s a process on which he holds a patent. Identify your opponent’s strength, and attack it so relentlessly that it becomes a liability. Richards was admired because she promised and delivered a ‘government that looked more like the people of the state.’ That included the appointment of blacks, Hispanics and gays and lesbians. Rove made that asset a liability.”[/li][li] After John McCain thumped George W. Bush in the 2000 New Hampshire primary, with 48 percent of the vote to Bush’s 30 percent, a massive smear campaign was launched in South Carolina, a key battleground. TV attack ads from third groups and anonymous fliers circulated, variously suggesting that McCain’s experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam left him mentally scarred with an uncontrollable temper, that his wife, Cindy, abused drugs and that he had an African-American “love child.”[/li][li] According to the investigation of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Rove played a central role in the outing of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame to columnist Robert Novak and former Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper, in retaliation for her husband Joe Wilson’s accusation that the Bush administration falsely claimed that Saddam Hussein sought uranium in Niger.[/li][li] Rove has ignored subpoenas to testify before Congress regarding the Justice Department scandal of the firing of nine U.S. attorneys. He skipped a hearing on improper use of RNC e-mail accounts by White House staff, which allowed them to skirt the Presidential Records Act.[/li][/ul]
(Some of the above are excerpted from this page.)
An excerpt from the first cite gives substance to the hunch that the forged memos were a White House trick:
If I insult Karl Rove, and lament that the country has been controlled by bastards of his ilk, am I part of the problem or part of the solution?