Rove's Alice Cooper Moment?

The rock band Alice Cooper used to be one of my adolescent favorites. I even saw them in concert twice--unfortunately the last time on their Million Dollar Babies tour. One of the legends--which I believe has been verified--about the band is that during their earliest concerts Alice would whip the crowd into frenzy and at the right moment throw a chikcen into the writhing masses. They then proceeded to tear the animal to pieces. ...

I bring up this little biographical tidbit because it seems to me that we've just witnessed a similar action by Karl Rove and George Bush. That is, with the frenzied democrats dancing in the aisles of the Capitol, Karl has thrown them and the press Donald Rumsfeld as a sacrifice. No doubt, Rove hopes to obviate anger and calls for investigations of the Bush admin by scapegoating Rumsfeld.

The scapegoat phenomenon is a powerful ritual by which some societies symbolically transfer communal guilt to an animal and either sacrifice it or banish it to the wilderness. In scapegoating Rumsfeld, Rove hopes that Bushco's sins will be expiated before the public. In this way, he and his boss hope to have their own sins forgiven and see the way forward to no accountability for all the lies and deception they have perpetrated upon the public.

As mikevotes puts it:

Now begins the ugly process of scapegoating wherein every bad decision will be tied to Rumsfeld in hopes they will sink with him.