Draw Four!!!

Here's Keith Olberman offering a terrific timeline of all the Bush terror alerts. He chronicles the negative Bush news that preceded them and notes the amount of time in between this bad news and the alerts.

All coincidences? Hah!

This was actually one of Rove's more transparent media manipulations. It's brilliant because how can the media even THINK about not covering a terror alert? They absolutely can't. Imagine the consequences if they were to not cover the story and then (by a true coincidence) there was an attack.

Ann Coulter would be hoarse for weeks afterwards from all the invective she'd be spewing, and she would actually have a decent argument for a change.

So the terror alerts gave Rove a LOT of power... sort of like a Draw Four card in the game Uno. It allowed Rove to stick it to his critics and immediately change the topic to one that didn't undermine Bush.

Smart bastard.