The mainstream media – urban daily newspapers, network news broadcasts, and cable news outlets, have failed to report or comment on the extended and highly significant absences of Presidential Advisor Karl Rove and Vice-President Dick Cheney from the White House.
Considering that both have been key players and policy makers in the executive-oriented Bush administration since day one, this is a highly critical story. The establishment news outlets appear to be treating it like the invisible elephant in the living room no one wants to acknowledge.
At this point the story is only available on the blogs, where there is some speculation that both men may have departed the Bush administrative team for good.
Rove’s absence of the past few weeks has been mentioned a few times on the NBC Nightly News and its sibling, MSNBC. Correspondents reporting it appear to assume that it’s due to the likelihood of Rove’s soon-to-be-announced indictment in connection with the Plame affair.
Cheney has been gone since mid-summer, and only re-appeared at the White House during the second week of October, just as the president was leaving town for a photo-op tour of the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast.
No mainstream source I'm aware of (please correct me if I'm wrong) has mentioned Cheney’s absence at all, prompting the Philadelphia blog Attytood to declare in a headline yesterday (Oct. 11), “Fun With Dick and George: The Biggest Story of 2005 is Hiding in Plain Sight.”
“Dick Cheney and George W. Bush don’t like each other any more,” Attytood contends, and adds, “Sometime this summer the vice president all but disappeared off the face of the earth. This time not to his undisclosed location, but mainly to his retreat in Wyoming. You may recall that even when Hurricane Katrina caused the biggest crisis in Washington since the start of the invasion Cheney was not seen for days.”
However, no one knows for sure why Cheney has been gone so long.
Nora Ephron at the Huffington Post speculates that Cheney’s absence is due to his personal involvement in the Plame affair, as opposed to such involvement being limited to his aide, Lewis Libby.
The blog TalkLeft recycles some unattributed political gossip, to the effect that Cheney left because he was deeply disturbed by Bush’s habitual bumbling, such as occurred at the time Katrina hit, and is tired of bailing him out.
“But I also don't discount that Cheney may be in deep doo-doo of his own over RoveGate,” the author of TalkLeft adds.
While the reasons for this apparent shift in key personnel at the top of the Bush Administration remains unknown, it appears to have happened, quietly, almost surreptitiously, and utterly without fanfare.
No comments:
Post a Comment