panicky pletka

* the other day i asked why the nyt gave panicky pletka free advertising space on their oped page. im not the only one...
"If one wonders where the New York Times might stand in the event that the Bush administration decides (or has already decided) that Iran becomes the second member of the axis of evil to be attacked militarily, one need look no further than the last three days of their coverage of the Iranian presidential elections. On Thursday, the Times ran an Op-Ed piece by Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute: a neo-con rant in which she erroneously predicted voter turnout as “unlikely to top 30 percent” and portrayed the probable winner of the election, Rafsanjani, as a corrupt and brutal terrorist-sponsoring “wheeler-dealer”." LINK

* "Kenneth Timmerman in NRO (and reprinted Friday by the Washington Times) entitled "Fake Election, Real Threats" in which he predicted that no more than 5 percent of eligible voters in Tehran would turn out." LINK
how did these people fuck it up so much? pletka was the same with her 30% nonsense. whatever battle they thought they were fighting is lost, cos their urgent lowballing on thursday simply makes the actual turnout look great. why did they all look so panicky on thursday?
they were obviously trying to de-legitimise the winner, but by grossly lowballing the turnout what did they get? 24 hours of the election maybe looking bad, but all that was quickly swept away with the high turnout figures. if they hadnt come out with their ridiculous projections, then nobody would have known whether a 60% turnout was strong or weak. ftr, the media i saw was mostly predicting something in the vicinity of 50%. ive been calling her panicky pletka since that article, but im at a loss for why they were so panicky and what they were trying to achieve. its not like the election snuck up on them, so why did they all seem so ill prepared to deal with it? maybe they expected us to be at war by nnow and didnt think theyd need a position statement?
and can i take a special moment to highlight the mindbending required to hear blinky condemn the elections as being controlled by unelected moolahs. meanwhile he condemns scotus for being unelected & blackrobed, and they specifically, dubiously chose him. remember that 'is irony dead?' question from late 2001? little did we know that it would largely be true, but for reasons we could never have imagined.