The idea put forward by Preznit Pissypants that Matthew Dowd turned on him because he was insane with grief over his son's military sojourn in Iraq is absurd, but equally ludicrous is the CW swirling around the bottom of the beltway pop psych set that because he isn't selling anything at the moment Dowd must be motivated by deep sincerity.

Somerby: 

No, Dowd hasn’t written a book (as far as we know). But he’s 45, and he has a long, big-bucks career ahead—in political and corporate work. (Unless he does the high-minded “mission work” he blubbered about to the Times.) So how about it? Do you think Dowd wants to pursue that corporate marketing career identified as the horrible creep who managed to sell us on Bush and his war? Duh! We have no earthly way to know if Dowd is sincere in his recent high-minded blubbering. But he has many possible self-serving reasons to jump off Bush’s sinking ship. The fact that Cox and Rosenthal can’t even imagine this fact—well, it just explains why Dowd and his team found it so easy to sell these rubes on Bush’s lunacies in past years. They still believe the sacks of sh*t they were sold about Candidate Gore, for example. But then, it’s easy to sell dog food to a group whose sense of smell is so bad.

Why has the RNC found it so easy to sell so much crap in the past fifteen years? Duh! Because brilliant savants like Rosenthal and Cox were the press corps’ savvy gate-keepers! Was Matt Dowd sincere in the sad tale he sobbed out to the New York Times? We don’t know, but we do know this: When people like Dowd want to flee sinking ships, this is just how they do it. Indeed, Dowd’s former partner, fellow Democrat-turned-Republican Mark McKinnon, told this same story in 1996, when he was jumping the sinking ship known as the Texas Democratic Party. Like McKinnon, Dowd left a sinking ship this week—telling us the same sad tale his partner told eleven years earlier.

You can't fool all the people all of the time, but Republicans have managed to fool the elite punditocracy with an alarming frequency.