wargate

* josh on karlgate: "And all of this, of course, meant to cover up the big lie -- the administration's knowing use of bogus WMD reports to convince the country to go to war."

it pains me muchly that this hasnt been obvious for the last 3 years, but ill take it today, or tomorrow. its so simple. perhaps we need to rebrand it wargate. or war-to-gate. or go-to-war-to-gate. or go-to-water-gate. or go-to-war-to-negate (domestic problems). or something.

i was grumpy when the media switched to calling the investigation something seemingly more benign like "cia leak probe" - apparently in an attempt to take pressure off rove - but the timing of that change in nomenclature coincided with the apparent step-up in the probe from rove to *everyone* - so that switch was inadvertently success for our side - because contemporaneuously, the story got much bigger than karl, and has since graduated into WDTVPKAWDHKI and WDTPOTUSKAWDHKI.

any ideas as to what the new branding should be? its not about rove or plame or wilson anymore, but about the war. my suggestions above arent perfect - but they 9obviously) try to draw a direct analogy to watergate - purely based on the fact that 'war' is a phonetic subset of 'watergate'.

you know where im headed anyway - if the notgannon thing had really taken off, we might have called it whore-ta-gate or whore-touch-gate or some such.

as you know, im not a big lakoff fan, but i also think that framing is really important. as the ignoramous thomas friedman said in his recent grossly-flawed column "words matter". again, my allusions to watergate might be too tortured, but they have the benefit of drawing a direct correlation to the impeachment of the president.

in the absence of finding a clever twist on 'watergate', im prepared to settle for 'wargate' - cos thats what we are talking about. keep it simple, stupid.