And he got one elected to the White House

by folkbum

Quote of the Day, from Karl "Turd Blossom" Rove: “I know lots of stupid people who went to Ivy League schools.” (Via.)

Pallin Pick -- Too Clever by Half

By Keith R. Schmitz

One could imagine the gnome from hell Karl Rove rubbing his fat paws over his ingenuity in getting war hero John McCain to pass on buddy Joe Lieberman for the circus clown Sarah Palin. In retrospect one could ponder the missed opportunity however, of if the idea is to pick a woman to sop up Hillary voters while Rove didn't pick Condie. That could have been a two-fer.

But no there is evidence that the election Rove needs to win to avoid prison time may be slipping away and that the Hillary herd is not turning in McCain's direction:

Sandy Goodman was deeply disappointed when Hillary Rodham Clinton didn't get the Democratic nomination, then again when she was bypassed for the VP spot. So Goodman, a longtime Florida Democrat, flirted with thoughts of shunning Barack Obama, and perhaps even voting Republican.

Then John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, and suddenly things became clear to Goodman: The Republicans had no place for her.

What? The evil genius is loosing his magic?

Evidence so far shows that Palin is not drawing a lot of support from voters outside the Republican base.

An ABC News poll released Friday found the selection of Palin makes people likelier to vote for McCain by just 6 percentage points _ half the 12-point margin by which Sen. Joe Biden makes them more likely to support Obama.

And as for Clinton supporters, eight in 10 said they'd vote for Obama in November, according to a Gallup Poll conducted last weekend after McCain announced his selection of Palin.

Sorry Karl. Women are not dumb. Well, maybe we can think of one.

Commander in Cheat

Or, "The Quarterback of Notre Dumb"

by folkbum

So I'm listening to NPR on my way home (I know! Shocking!), and they were interviewing the guy who wrote the new book on George W. Bush, Robert Draper (listen to the interview there, and read an excerpt from the book).

Draper explained, among other things, Bush's relationship with Karl Rove. He said (I'm paraphrasing here), "Bush and Rove are like the high school quarterback and the nerd who does all the quarterback's term papers."

And this from an author who likes Bush!

Is it 2009 yet?

Our Every Other Day Op-Ed Torture

By Keith Schmitz

What explains the presence of Patrick McIllheran on the op-ed pages of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, other than he is a marketing device. Somehow the feeling of management is that there is a need for balance served by putting before us someone who is so conservative. The only problem is that no one on the staff of the Journal is as liberal as Paddy Mac is doctrinaire and partisan. No, that does not include Eugene Kane.

The oddity of Paddy is his ability to be aggressively naive and cynical at the same time. Case in point was his blog post on Karl Rove this week.

Pegging Rove as corrupt is as natural to the senses as saying water is wet. Yet in Paddy Partisan world, liberal anger towards Rove is miss-applied. "They saw Rove had talent used in the service of Bush, so they attacked him."

Could it ever enter Paddy's mind that maybe, just maybe, many people are sick and tired of Rove's immorality (even the toady John McCain), his win at all costs style and his scorched earth tactics that win the war but sicken the rest of us, all in the service of electing one of the most incompetent Presidents in the history of this country?

As Hunter over at DailyKos put it:

He (Rove) could carve up constituencies with the best of them, and divide the country as easily as columns on a spreadsheet -- and with no more thought -- but Karl Rove was no more a political genius than Jeffrey Dahmer was a brilliant culinary artist.

In Paddy's sunny world he sees only genius, because this twisted handling of the electorate was designed to get something McIllheran wanted. He fails to recognize the national unity that got rode over in the process. Hey, we're in a war, aren't we?

But maybe the similarities between Karl and Paddy are being missed.

It would be nice to think every media outlet in some way does something to add to the public good. McIllheran though adds nothing to the local dialogue except snarky morsels served up for a market niche.

Oddly, these are people who will never accept the Journal's news reporting as valid because it fails to paint the world in the colors they want.

Straight talk about Rove's legacy

By bert

Karl Rove is an awful person who damaged our government big time.

That needed to be said, I think. Partly because I believe it, and partly because the professional commentators are not speaking enough plain truth about this guy since Rove announced Monday that he is leaving his White House job.

Smart bloggers like Josh Marshall and Jay Rosen have also noticed something unsatisfying (lazy maybe?) about the Rove discussion so far.

So what did Rove do, now that he’s mostly done doing it?

1. Rove did unforgiveable things to people.
It’s not easy to do things that make politics seem even more repugnant than it already seems. But, remember, Rove was buddies with Lee Atwater. In Rove's case there are too many disgusting acts to list even most of them. Is that why nobody does so?

I'll start the ball rolling with a relatively well-known awful case. During the primary campaign that Rove directed for George W. Bush in 2000 a push-poll phone project called up South Carolina anti-abortion group members and suggested that Bush’s front-running opponent, Sen. John McCain, fathered an illegitimate baby with an African-American prostitute. That's not true of course; McCain and his wife Cindy adopted that girl from a Bangladesh orphanage.

I will gladly admit that Rove has some impressive skills, and that one is to keep his fingerprints off the personal destruction that he perpetrates. Without proof for some of this stuff, most people are convinced they happened because they fit with Rove’s character.

A profile by Matt Bai in the New York Times Sunday Magazine uses an old saying to describe Rove's core belief: there are no rules in a knife fight. In another magazine piece, this one by Ron Suskind in Esquire, Suskind related an anecdote that spells out Rove’s behavior on a day-to-day basis. As Suskind was entering Rove’s White House office for an interview . . .

Rove was talking to an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had displeased him. I paid it no mind and reviewed a jotted list of questions I hoped to ask. But after a moment, it was like ignoring a tornado flinging parked cars. "We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!" As a reporter, you get around—curse words, anger, passionate intensity are not notable events—but the ferocity, the bellicosity, the violent imputations were, well, shocking. This went on without a break for a minute or two. Then the aide slipped out looking a bit ashen, and Rove, his face ruddy from the exertions of the past few moments, looked at me and smiled a gentle, Clarence-the-Angel smile. "Come on in."

Besides his treatment of McCain in South Carolina, Rove also has his gloved hand (no fingerprints) on the sleazy stratagems to ruin other Vietnam veterans who became politicians, such as John Kerry. One of Rove’s legacies is that the term “swift-boating” is now a gerund that has become common usage.

Former Georgia Senator Max Cleland was also a Vietnam veteran, wheelchair-bound now thanks to a grenade in Vietnam. In the 2004 congressional elections, one that Rove openly stated Republican lawmakers could win by exploiting the terror issue, Cleland was attacked in television ads that implied he supported Osama bin Laden. In yet another profile of Rove in the Atlantic Monthly, author Joshua Green states that a Rove trademark is to attack opponents on the parts of their biography, such as military service, that seem unassailable.

Green’s example for Rove’s urge to attack the unassailable draws from Rove's work on an Alabama Supreme Court race in 1994. Rove’s candidate faced an opponent who promoted his volunteer work on behalf of abused children. To counter this endearing attribute, Rove started a whispering campaign originating among students at the University of Alabama Law School that suggested Kennedy was a pedophile. Rove may deny this too, but in this case, a former assistant, anonymous in the article, admitted openly to the reporter that this was Rove’s strategy all along.

But Democrats like Kerry, Kennedy, and Cleland willingly entered politics, and they know campaigns are not tiddlywinks. The one I still can’t get over – and I know it’s old news now – is that Rove also marshaled his skills and influence to successfully mount a project to destroy Cindy Sheehan. Do you folks think that Rove was capable, let’s say in August of 2005 during Camp Casey, of shouting into the phone to some of his staff, saying “we will fuck her like nobody has ever fucked her! We will ruin her!” and be talking about the mother of a Marine killed in Iraq?

Too many of the stories on Rove this week praise him for being an effective campaign manager. You can be that and at the same time be a really bad man. The morality of someone like Bill Clinton or even Richard Nixon seems, by comparison, almost saintly.

2. Rove pimped policy to service politics.

Again, the realists are rolling their eyes at my quaint naiveté. But many seasoned Washington observers who stopped being naïve long ago have stated that there used to a membrane in the White House -- a permeable membrane -- that fuzzily marked a separation between governing and winning elections. These same observers say that there is no separation now. The former White House aide and political science professor John DiIulio, for example, regrets to admit that policy under Bush is just backfill for politics.

Sad to say, but we don’t have to extrapolate out the possible bad effects of a White House that governs solely for the sake of its own power. In our time, the Iraq War is a reality that proves the worst effects imaginable.

As my father would put it, you know goddamn good and well that Rove was in that room when Bush decided to invade Iraq. Frank Rich also thinks so. His book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold, rightfully points out the baffling fact that no one really knows to this day why Bush launched that war. Rich’s own reasoned answer is there were two main causes. One cause came from many of Bush’s influential advisors – Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld – who wanted a war with Iraq even before the Sept. 11 attacks. They were thinking of geopolitics, payback, and Israel. Another cause was Karl Rove, who also wanted that war because he calculated – “metrics” he likes to call it -- that the war would be necessary in order for Republicans lawmakers to win in the mid-term 2002 elections. This article is a briefer version of Rich's argument.

Let’s not, out of malaise or some sense of decorum or objectivity, give Rove a pass for stunts like this: Starting a war to win elections, and then ruining the mother of a son killed in it.

The Karl Rove Caucus

by folkbum

Karl Rove and his pals have systematically set out to make Republicans with integrity an endangered species.

That's from digby over the weekend. Digby may well be the smartest man on the intertubes; even so, you might think that, perhaps, his thinking about Karl Rove is just so much hyperbole.

But it's hard not to think that he's dead-on. Digby specifically is writing about the suspicious firing of eight US attorneys who weren't playing the game right. (Look, I know that Clinton fired all of Bush I's appointees. But Bush II fired all of Clinton's appointees. So shut up about that.) When you weigh the evidence--as digby does with, for example, David Iglesias--you see people of high moral and ethical standards railroaded out (thanks to the U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act) in favor of toadies, in one case, literally, a Karl Rove protègè. And elbow-deep in those firings is Rove himself. (More from Josh Marshall.)

And it's hard not to think about Rove's influence on contemporary conservative politics when you read things like this post from David at Carrick Bend (language warning, via Wiggy). It isn't so much David's use of the Coulter f-word (and his defense of her use of it), but rather his demonization of conservatives who thought Coulter crossed a line there:

Who are you idiots again? Conservatives? Hell no. You are flaming liberals.

The single worst insult David can think to throw at people who don't meet his infantile standards of conservatism is liberal, though none of the targets of his wrath come close to being accurately described as such. But this is a clear Rovism; demonize everyone who disagrees with you, until you have no allies left. There's a reason Bush's poll numbers haven't seen the bright side of 40% in years, and it's this attitude--perpetuated at the White House by Rove. If you keep cutting off people who might be your natural allies, you end up pretty lonely. Some day the Carrick Bend guy is going to look around and wonder where his friends are.

Well, him and Karl Rove.