CALLING HERCULE POIROT: The Other McCain has a theory worthy of an Agatha Christie drawing room scene:
Who is paying the consultant Wesley Donahue, who is leaking all this? Also, who is paying Will Folks?
Oh wait, lookie here, Wesley Donahue is a consultant, or has been, for Mitt Romney. . . .
Could it be that Mitt Romney is deep-sixing Nikki Haley in anticipation of his presidential run? This, of course, is pure speculation, but there is no question that the Palin endorsement of Nikki Haley helped her and that Haley being governor would help Palin and whomever Palin endorses.
But Romney endorsed Haley first, so that doesn’t make sense. Political consultants are hired guns who have multiple clients and if Wes Dohanue is behind this take-down operation against Haley, it doesn’t mean that Romney’s money is paying for it.
UPDATE:
Wolfe Reports does a number of Red State's Erick Erickson assembling the world and jamming a cream pie into his own face:
Oh, this is rich. RedState’s Erick Erickson, the Viking lord of the interwebs, wrote yesterday that he had talked to a lot of people and that he definitively knew that Will Folks got paid to out his relationship withRep. Nikki Haley. Today, at the grand unveiling, he had a whole bunch of nothing, part of which was predicated on a post by, of all people, Wheels and his defunct blog. The whole post is a miasma of educated guesses, which is a lot of what we do over here. The difference is that Erickson is viewing the situation from afar, which means, as one tweet put it, that he’s clueless.
He’s laying the whole thing at the feet of Lt. Gov. André Bauer, because of Rod Shealy and Jake Knotts, the end. Really. No talk of when Folks was paid, how he was paid, how much he was paid and who did the paying. Erickson did lay this bit of knowledge:
Then there is Jake Knotts who allegedly hired a private investigator to dig into Will Folks and who is rumored to be responsible for the rumored picture. Knotts also helped in the Bauer Palace Coup. Note that in the same blog post at the Palmetto Scoop about Knott’s involvement to help Bauer, Adam Fogle wrote the quote, “Bauer seems to have cut some kind of deal with blogger Bill Folks.”
UPDATE: Red State, which said they knew who's behind the "money" some claim is behind the Folks Story, unveiled the goods today and admitted they don't know squat.
Will any of Erick Erickson's new analyst colleagues on CNN ask him about how his standards justified this item?
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Brunch-curdling gossip summary:
Cotton Boll Conspiracy has a smart and detailing account of how the big state dead tree media have offered pretty lame coverage of the Folks- Haley business, especially since Folks released a ton of cell phone records showing some 700 calls between the two, some lasting several hours into the early morning. Definitely worth a read, even as we head into the long weekend news hole (The White House, for example, dropped its Sestak report this morning).
In our book the P&C has done the best so far. They seem to be operating on a follow the money trail theory, but they seem to be stuck, and Erick Erickson of Red State, who says he's got the good, ain't saying who.
More to the point, the fundamental irrationalities of the story remain. If Folks passionately supports Haley for governor, why is he engaging in his daily ("I've got nothing else to say") water torture of more interviews and document drops, other than the boost he numbers and ad revenue? What's with the Donehue angle?
TPM thinks the latest data dump is no smoking gun?
TRAFFIC MAXIMIZATION STRATEGY?
Will Folks
South Carolina blogger Will Folks won't disclose the details of the affair he alleges he had with leading GOP gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley -- at least not all at once. Rather, he's dropping some new revelation each day into his blog. Call it death by a thousand blog posts.
In today's installment, Folks releases phone records showing hundreds of calls between the two back in 2007, when the affair allegedly occurred. Many of the calls lasted for hours and stretched late into the night. Suggestive? Yes. Conclusive? Not so much: Folks was working for Haley at the time.
--David Kurtz
HuffPo notes that most of the calls were during the year Folks was doing some for work Haley, as well as the year he claims the affair began. But no whiff of gunpowder yet. Haley's campaign manager slaps the matter down:
"This is getting ridiculous," Tim Pearson, Haley's campaign manager, said in a statement. "A blogger drops a thousand pages of phone records unearthing the mind-blowing revelation that he and Nikki Haley spoke on the phone. Of course they spoke on the phone. It is no secret Will Folks worked for Nikki -- she happens to be one of the few people willing to disclose her association with him. Nikki has forthrightly and repeatedly denied the false allegations against her, and at some point this nonsense has to stop."
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