X

I watched CBS News this evening and was surprised to hear a new theory concerning the White House Plamegate scandal. It seems now that there are rumors circulating (source unknown and apparently unneeded) that there is a Mr. X involved in the release of Valerie Plame's name to the media, the theory being that if Mr. X isn't prosecuted, nobody else should be either. My initial response was I wonder whatever happened to responsible journalism at CBS. Perhaps this is payback for Rathergate.
But then I realized that there was a second possibility. There is a phantom operating among us. I saw his picture in the paper the other day when I was standing at the checkout counter in a store in a nearby town waiting for my wife to write a check for groceries and then be told that personal checks aren't accepted except from locals. The picture looked familiar, but then again it didn't, so I read the headline and low and behold it was the Phantom of Iraq, Zarqawi, but he had taken on a whole new look. He was westernized. He was wearing a western-style white shirt and large-framed glasses, no hat but a slightly receding hairline and strangely enough, the very same facial expression that he had on his one other ever in history picture. By the looks of it, Mr. Zarqawi must have taken a position as a respected university professor somewhere in the Western World, or at least that's what he looked like in the picture.
It wasn't until just this evening that I realized why he looked so familiar. I see his look-alike every time I log in to Juan Cole's blog at Informed Comment: http://www.juancole.com/
Putting 2 and 2 together, I realized that perhaps the Phantom of Iraq is also the Phantom of the White House, the illustrious new Mr. X and that CBS really wasn't taking a quantum leap after all since CBS is one of the primary voices for Zarqawi-hating propaganda just as the New York Times was a primary voice of pre-Iraq War propaganda regarding WMDs. It's hard to find the links sometimes, but the world really does make sense if you study all the possibilities.
I needed to get my truck inspected today so I took it to a local garage late this afternoon. While I was waiting I was watching CNN coverage of Hurricane Wilma's hit on Florida, but there was something odd about the coverage. In the end, I realized that what I had seen was a shameless ten or fifteen minute plug for Jeb Bush for President in '08! Is there no end to all this MainStream Media political propaganda nonsense??????? Is that our fate now in the media? Is reality really up for sale to the highest bidder?