Pelosi clearly implicated in Smith’s death

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is suspected of involvement in the mysterious death of former Playboy playmate and reality television star Anna Nicole Smith, so implies a well-placed source who declined to be named because of the nature of the speculation. The San Francisco Democrat has clearly benefited from the shift in national attention, and so would have a motive in provoking the Texas model’s early demise.

“One need only have tuned to ‘The Situation Room’ to understand the implications,” theorized a source. The Situation Room is a CNN newsmagazine hosted by Wolfe Blitzer, and Ms. Smith’s death—only eleven minutes before Blitzer was to go on air—changed the focus of the show. CNN, which has followed the lead of the Washington Times in breathlessly promoting the Pelosi-Air “investigation” every day this week because there was reportedly nothing else going on of note in the world, had intended to continue to speculate incessantly about the leak from an anonymous Department of Defense source that had provoked at least two rabid Republican representatives to condemn the new Democrat leader. The former topless dancer’s passing caused Blitzer, along with CNN colleagues Nancy Grace and Larry King, to instead speculate incessantly about the life and death of Ms. Smith.

Ms. Pelosi was thus spared hours of information-free scrutiny.

“The connections between CNN’s previous coverage and current coverage cannot be ignored,” some source sort of said, “They were talking about Pelosi and then they weren’t—they were talking about Anna Nicole—you do the math.”

White House spokesman Tony Snow, possibly in an attempt to head off the Smith murder, also urged members of the Washington media to move on. “This is a silly story,” he said.

Snow did not revise his statement to reiterate support for Speaker Pelosi after the death of Anna Nicole Smith.


(As you by now might have noticed, absolutely nothing in this post is supportable with a link to a factual source because absolutely nothing here is factual. Nothing except the Snow quote, that is—he did say the Pelosi non-story is “silly.”

If you want to know what the facts are about the travel needs of the new Democratic House Speaker, you might take a look at this and this. If you want to know what is really going on in the world, don’t try turning on CNN or reading the Washington Times. Instead, try googling Iraq war, Iran war, Darfur, Congressional Oversight Iraq, etc.

I also want to congratulate AZ Representative Jeff Flake for summing up the level of the Pelosi controversy stoked by his Republican brethren this way: “Next week, we are going to steal their mascot and short-sheet their beds.”)


Update: Harry Shearer, Paul Riekhoff, and Marty Kaplan take different approaches to roughly this same point.