It is looking more and more like Rove’s offensive remarks were, as always is the case with the Rove, a political strategy:
Rove’s new comments come on the heels of an interview with David Gregory on MSNBC on Tuesday, in which Rove provided indications that Bush’s new PR blitz to regain support for the war in Iraq may include the implication that criticizing Bush’s plan is tantamount to supporting the insurgency.
When Gregory asked Rove about the dwindling public support for the war, Rove answered: “We need to remember, that’s part of the goal of the insurgents. Their goal is to weaken our resolve by being so violent and so dangerous and so ugly that they hope that we will turn tail and run.”
And consider that all this is coming from a man who in April, in a talk at Washington College in Chestertown, Md., lit into the press corps for hyping political conflict.
Sullivan seems to agree:
Rove’s strategic decision to make social security reform the center-piece of the second term has also, shall we say, not gone according to plan. So what to do? You do what you always do. You create a scenario in which you cannot be out-demagogued. You deflect from the awful fall-out from the decision to exempt terror suspects from bans on cruel and inhumane treatment to a senator’s analogy to the Gulag. And instead of leveling with the country about the real difficulty of the war we’re in, acknowledging error and sketching a unifying vision for winning, you divide the country into good folk and “liberals” and hope it works as well as it always has. If you want to know how well the administration really believes the war is going, listen to their rhetoric. And start worrying.
SOMETIMES I WONDER if Karl Rove is as smart as everyone says. But just as the Durbin affair was dying down, he makes a comment about liberals and the war that leads Democrats — itching for payback — to angrily demand his resignation.
Trouble is, those demands just provide an excuse for Republicans to repeat every single stupid or unpatriotic thing that every Democratic politician ever said. And there are a lot of those. Examples can be found here, and here, and here. And, of course, there’s this. And because the usual suspects in the media could be expected to pick up on the Rove story much faster than the Durbin story (as they did) now there’s a news hook.
Yeah, he’s pretty smart.
Well, then- I guess if we are only calling liberals traitors for partisan political purposes, and we don’t really mean it, I guess it is ok. [/sarcasm]
Some party we have here.