For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it refers to the classic film of the same name, in which Charles Boyer tries to convince Ingrid Bergman she is going mad, by sneaking around in crawlspaces and making strange noises and causing the gaslights in the house to flicker, and various things like that, and then denying any awareness of these odd goings-on, telling her she must be imagining it all.
That’s what the Bushies and their sycophants are doing, and will be trying to do, to you and me.
They want to convince you that there’s a perfectly plausible explanation for the whole yellowcake thing — such as the idea that the reference wasn’t to Niger at all, but some unnamed other African nation, or that there’s no reason for all this hand-wringing since Tony Blair still sticks by his story (even if he has recently downgraded his defense to saying that it was “not beyond the bounds of possibility,” a caveat which could equally encompass dancing elephants giving a performance on the observation deck of the Empire State Building — but I digress.) They want to convince you that the media is just on a witch hunt, there’s nothing to the story at all. They want to convince you that the intelligence was good, that this is all a tempest in a teapot and not worth anyone’s attention at all, move along, move along, there’s absolutely nothing happening here and we certainly didn’t notice the gaslights flickering, no indeed.
All I can say is, keep your eyes open and your bullshit detector set on high. Whatever clever strategy they come up with to distract attention from this thing, or to convince you that you’ve completely misunderstood everything — take it with a grain of salt.