Friday Dump

Traditionally, news that government doesn't want people to notice is released late on Friday. It's referred to as a Friday Dump, and it operates on the hope that instead of being front page news the next morning, all the best reporters will have gone home for the weekend, and so the news will trickle out slowly, and by the time the regular reporters are back on Monday, it has become an old story, thus avoiding full coverage.

One such story this week (seen here on Yahoo) involves a supposed leak of American invasion plans by Russia to Saddam Hussein in the days before we launched the current war.

Now, it is fairly common knowledge that in the age of bloggers and 24 hour news networks, the Friday Dump is no longer as successful a strategy as it once was. It's also a widely known and recognized technique.

So, I ask myself, what is there about this story that the Administration doesn't want people to be talking about? It just doesn't seem like that damaging a story to the President or the Administration.

So here's my guess, and we get to see over the next week or two whether I'm getting good at figuring out Rovian politics or whether I've missed the boat on this one:

My guess is that they actually WANT this story out there, but they want to make it APPEAR as though they don't. Further, my guess is that this story will then be cited, within the month, as further proof that Saddam Hussein had sufficient time and warning to get the WMDs out of his country before we arrived. This will allow the Administration to make a possibly credible sounding argument that there actually were such weapons and possibly take back some of the support he's lost as some people begin to see him as decisive and visionary again.

Now, I want to stress, this is not NEWS. This is merely my guess. But I'm in a mood to play the "how good are my guesses" game, and the best way I can do that is to post this now, so that if my guesses are good, there are people who will have read this before it happened. If not, well, it's still a fun game for a Friday evening.

Liam.