Just because there are no aspens here, please don't assume that the title of this post is some kind of code, much less that it indicates a conspiracy. The truth is that it's an excuse for some days off based on nothing more than a phonological similarity between "aspens" and other issues that have been on my mind. No... really!!!

After a year and a half I'm taking a week off, which doesn't mean that I may not write something over the course of the week, only that I will not feel compelled to write.

Now about this aspen business—you know, the lines that Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney's aide, wrote to the imprisoned Judith Miller in his letter of September 15:

Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work—and life.

The first thing that is odd about these lines—aside from their prima facie oddness—is that there have been, by latest count, only two journalists in the entire MSM who thought they were odd, or at least thought they were odd enough to put it in print: Columnists Gene Lyons of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and, derivatively, Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher.

Even Greg Mitchell didn't think they were odd until a confidential source in the MSM told him so. Get this—

I’m proud to say that I was the first to print the full text of the letter, at E&P Online, early last Saturday.... Within hours, the blogs were linking, and posters were finding codes and conspiracies in Scooter’s suggestion that the aspens that Judy supposedly knows and loves out West would be “turning” together this fall because they are, after all, “connected at the roots.”

Some bloggers recalled a significant meeting of neo-cons and/or Iraqi exiles in Aspen, Colo., that Miller might have attended. And so on.

I scoffed at first, but today I read a confidential letter from a top Washington editor who seemed to think there was something to this code business.

Mitchell then cites his only "above ground" source Gene Lyons. Is it just me, or is this odd—that journalists don't find this odd? No wonder there's no investigative reporting going on these days!

Lyons himself was noncommittal about the meaning of the aspens but had little doubt that there was meaning to be had. He wrote,

The letter also implicitly promised Miller big scoops on, get this, Iran's nuclear weapons, and closed with a poetic line reminding her that ''(O)ut West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them.''

Ponder that metaphor for a moment.

Here's all I know: If Hillary Clinton had written Susan McDougal a letter like that, the Washington press would have exploded with indignation. The TV talking heads would be predicting indictments, and the phrase of the week would be "criminal conspiracy."

Now in the blogosphere there has been quite a bit of speculation on the meaning of the message. At the Democratic Underground the favorite is that "aspen" is a reference to the recent Aspen conference where columnist Robert Novak was shocked to find the right-wingers bashing Bush. In this view, Libby is using "aspens" as a metaphor for the Neo-cons. Of course, that implies that Judith Miller, assuming that she is connected at the roots with Scooter Libby, is herself a Neo-con.

Actually, the metaphorical meaning of the aspens is a key to understanding the message. What "roots" do Scooter Libby and Judith Miller have in common? If you can figure this one out, please alert the MSM and the blogosphere. They won't publish it, but at least you'll know they know.

Meanwhile, it's just our secret.