I Guess I'm Just a Stickler for Consistency

The Kerry people can't have it both ways.

For the past 18 months, when anything--anything--good happens to Bush or bad happens to the Democrats, the Dems and their cohorts in the mainstream media carp about the "suspicious timing" of the event.

Remember the Sandy Berger classified-documents-stuffed-in-his pants fiasco? (You could be forgiven for not remembering--the media dropped it as quickly as they could.) To refresh your memory: just before the Democrat convention, a Democrat National Security Advisor was revealed to have been caught stealing classified documents pertaining to the 9/11 investigation (!), and the whole story was played as an incident of "suspicious timing."

Remember the capture of Saddam Hussein? Democrats implied that Saddam had been in custody for months and was only unveiled at a critical time to boost Bush's sagging popularity.

Now the Swiftboat Controversy is taking place, and many (including Donna Brazile, Al Gore's former campaign chairman, and also a guy from TIME magazine I saw on Tim Russert over the weekend) are actually expressing relief that it's happening in August rather than in October.

Brazile says:

After having a high-energy and well-defined convention where Kerry was introduced as a decorated war hero he was forced to play defense by a group of former Vietnam veterans vehemently opposed to his candidacy. As the challenger, Kerry had to personally respond to these scurrilous attacks on his character with the hopes of setting the record straight before November. Thankfully for Kerry, this back-and-forth occurred in the slow news month of August and not in October, which would have made it omnipresent in the minds of voters.

So which is it, folks? Is Bush not the master, Machiavellian manipulator of "suspicious timing" that you're always portraying him as, or does he have no connection with the Swifties?