Lone Gunmen Department: Where's the Gorilla?

I have a paranoid theory about the whole Bernie Kerik nomination: what if the whole fiasco was actually planned as part of an overall strategy to distract the press? And, at the same time, to contribute to taking Rudy G. out of the running for 08 (too moderate).

Spouse says, "I dunno, sometimes they're just incompetent" and that's true enough, but sometimes they're not.

I'm just saying. I consider, like Paul Krugman, that the current administration actually has revolutionary aims: to utterly remake this country and our government. They mean to break the government so badly that we all, essentially, give up on it, and thus do nothing when they drown it in Grover Norquist's bathtub. In fact, by then, we may be happy to see it go.

They just won a major battle in the 04 elections, and now they are pressing ahead on many fronts: creating their fake social security crisis; preparing the ground for their horrible judicial nominations;, keeping Senate dems under control by threatening to take away the filibuster; completing their efforts to gut environmental protections; and egging on the Democratic party as it turns in on itself, arguing about Michael Moore and the DLC.

They are advancing, people, and we are bickering. They are advancing on so many fronts, and our energies are divided, distracted, dissipated. They are running a good war here, and they are winning it.

So maybe I'm just a paranoid geek straight out of The X-Files, but Bernie Kerik appears too obvious to me. Yesterday someone I was working with showed me this internet perception experiment thing, where you're supposed to watch a video and count the number of times people in white shirts pass a basketball to one another. The instructions tell you to really focus on the white shirts and the basketball, that it is really really important to get the count right. And while you're paying attention to the white shirts and the basketball, a man in a gorilla suit walks through the middle of them all, waves his arms wildly, and walks off again.

Most people, apparently, simply don't notice the gorilla. I did, because the instructions were soooo insistent that I pay attention to the basketball. I've always been bad at following instructions.

So I'm just asking, what with this fake social security crisis, and the bernie kerik thing, and all the other basketballs they're throwing around, that we pay attention instead to the gorillas. Because I see a whole bunch of them out there, all of them waving their arms wildly, and nobody noticing.