Rove v. Crow

My friend Jim sends this:

wow... this is something I'd never imagine...

Sheryl Crow is saying she suspects Karl Rove spread the "toilet paper conservation" story to make her look silly. Geez, that Karl Rove sure gets around !

--link--

...To which I said:

Karl Rove couldn't possibly have enough hours in the day to dream up smears of rock musicians. The very idea is sketch-comedy-worthy. Rove in his office, chomping on a cigar, chuckling devilishly: "I've got it! We'll win the midterms decisively... by making the nation believe Sheryl Crow wants everyone to use one square of toilet paper per bathroom trip!"

Also, Sheryl Crow was going around publicly at that point saying, "People should use one square of toilet paper per bathroom trip." I read a blog post she put up at the Huffington Post saying as much. Karl Rove did not make her do any of this. Sure, in context she was obviously speaking in jest. But with a little trim of Occam's razor we scarcely need bring Karl Rove into the picture to explain how that got misinterpreted....

(This reminds me of Al Gore's troubles in 2000. No, not Florida - before that. I mean back when everybody said he said he'd invented the internet, and was the star of Love Story and of Love Canal and etc. So many false, boasty claims that if fact-checked were actually true, and not even very boasty? Karl Rove didn't sit around crafting weird campaigns of misinformation like this, which were entirely dependent on the amplification within the echo chamber of a hungry news hole 0f misstated facts from lazy initial reports. We know Rove didn't do this, because (a) only the news media itself can be responsible for lazy initial reports and their later amplification, and (b) this sort of misinformation is too weird to make up on purpose.)

In short: the phrase "Karl Rove" is liberalspeak for "the way right-wingers think". And the danger is in considering one-off news items and self-organizing opinion trends as the results of a conscious, evil plot.