Just Make Sure You're Right

While I doubt there are still people crouching in the bushes outside of Patton Boggs waiting for Rove to be taken into custody:

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As TruthOut reported Friday evening, Rove told President Bush and Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, as well as a few other high level administration officials, that he will be indicted in the CIA leak case and will immediately resign his White House job when the special counsel publicly announces the charges against him, according to sources.

Details of Rove's discussions with the president and Bolten have spread through the corridors of the White House, where low-level staffers and senior officials were trying to determine how the indictment would impact an administration that has been mired in a number of high-profile political scandals for nearly a year, said a half-dozen White House aides and two senior officials who work at the Republican National Committee.

Speaking on condition of anonymity Friday night, sources confirmed Rove's indictment was imminent. These individuals requested anonymity saying they were not authorized to speak publicly about Rove's situation. A spokesman in the White House press office said they would not comment on "wildly speculative rumors."

There are no doubt some people are still waiting anxiously for the "Whitey" tape to drop:

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Much of Mychal Massie's May 31 WorldNetDaily column is your typical right-wing rant that Michelle Obama is a "bitter harridan" who "has a deep contempt for white people in America." But Massie also tries to revive one of the more discredited myths about her:

A tape that was reportedly filmed in 2004 during the Rainbow/Push Coalition Conference at Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church has mysteriously disappeared from public view. The tape allegedly showed Michelle Obama hysterically ranting about "Whiteys" and savagely attacking Bill Clinton as responsible for African genocide. The wife of Louis Farrakhan was one of the honored guests.

Massie seems not to have considered the possibility that the purported tape has "mysteriously disappeared" because it never existed in the first place. Obama's campaign has stated that "No such tape exists. Michelle Obama has not spoken from the pulpit at Trinity and has not used that word." Even conservative blogger Michelle Malkin noted that the purported tape was being hyped by "buffoons" whose claims about it were constantly shifting.

And Dan Rather's professional standing and reputation never recovered from the consequences of reporting the truth about the Bush Air National Guard story, but, in the process, biting down hard enough on a career-ending cyanide-capsule of false (possibly honey-potted) information that the actual story disappeared in a cloud of chaff about Mr. Rather's integrity and alleged professional biases long enough to let George W. Bush slip into the White House.

The blogosphere's memory is full of legendary stories that never quite materialized, or that were true but infused with enough disinformation and/or error that the important facts of the story got lost down the rabbit hole of speculation about the motives and honor of the people reporting the story.  

Which is why -- precisely because the still-unfolding NSA/Snowden story is large and consequential -- someone somewhere needs to lose a few teeth for letting this sort of bullshit unforced error slide through:

The first sign that something wasn't right with the story was that the tech companies strongly denied that government snoops had any access to their servers. Then, "a funny thing happened," says Ed Bott at ZDNet: Quietly — without issuing any clarification or correction — "The Post revised the story, backing down from sensational claims it made originally." Gone was the phrase "participate knowingly." The phrase "track a person's movements and contacts over time" was changed to "track foreign targets." Also erased: The claim that the NSA is "tapping directly into the central servers" of Silicon Valley giants.