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"Memo to The Media: Having Rove on to Pontificate on the Economy is like Having Madoff on to Pontificate on Investing."
Source urrl: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/memo-to-the-media-having_b_171187.html
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On Face the Nation, Rahm Emanuel declared that Rush Limbaugh is "the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party." This is a useful stance for the Obama administration. As David Frum puts it: "With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence -- exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to the GOP. And indeed it sort of fits the GOP in general.
But, in truth, Rush is just a massive shiny forehead that distracts our attention from the real intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party, which is Karl Rove. At the same time Emanuel was on CBS anointing Limbaugh top dog, over on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos Rove was demonstrating just WHY he is the real force and the real danger in the wounded-but-still-destructive GOP.
For starters, there is the fact that he was even on the show. This Week with Stephanopoulos would never have had Rush on as a panelist, but there, big as life, was Rush's more intelligent twin. Rove amiably chatted about the week's events with Stan Greenberg, Katrina vanden Heuvel, and George Will.
Then there is Rove's clever, decidedly anti-Limbaugh approach, whereby instead of yelling and foaming at the mouth, he calmly, lucidly, and shamelessly attempts to whitewash the past and rewrite history. A history he was front and center in the making of.
Yes, there he was, the picture of calm reasonableness, trying to discredit and emasculate Obama's proposals to get us out of the economic mess made by his administration -- without ever once acknowledging that he was a major, prime architect of the mess. (Don't forget that, according to Paul O'Neill, back in 2002, when Bush was having second thoughts about a fresh round of tax cuts for the wealthy -- wondering "Didn't we already give them a break?" -- Rove urged him to "stick to principle.")
Having Karl Rove on a major political talk show to pontificate about the economy is like having Bernie Madoff on Wall Street Week in Review to offer advice about investing.
What's next? Inviting Chris Brown on to tsk-tsk about the dangers of domestic violence? Or having Octo-mom, Nadya Suleman, on a family planning program to lecture about the need for birth control? Or Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis to hold forth on corporate responsibility?
Rove has studied his George Orwell and he understands that "who controls the past, controls the future." That's why we saw Rove lambasting Obama's running the deficit higher, of course conveniently skipping over the nearly $9 trillion added to the national debt by the administration he helped guide. Not one word about the role that those massive tax cuts for the rich that Rove championed had played in creating the current economic crisis. Not a peep about the deregulation of Wall Street he held so dear to his heart.
Indeed, he tried to lay the Bush administration's fiscal legacy at the feet of "two wars, 9/11, and a recession" as if these magically just happened, but failed to mention these were handed to us by the previous administration.
Notice the hypocrisy and dishonesty of sidestepping any accountability for the last eight years. And acting as if the Iraq war just happened -- and wasn't one of the prime goals the man whose presidency he was credited with being the brains of. In the Rovian universe, there is no such thing as accountability or cause and effect. He has even gotten away with thumbing his nose at Congress with no accountability there either. He is able to hide behind Bush's claim of perpetual executive privilege even after Dubya's retirement.
To set things right, we have to understand how they went so wrong. And that's hard to do when the truth is under assault, and the past brazenly revised.
During the panel discussion on This Week, Stephanopoulos ran a clip package from CPAC that showed Limbaugh and others repeating tired claims about Obama and "socialism." Rove jumped at the opportunity, happy to brand this over-the-top rhetoric "red meat for the hardcore Republican conservatives," the better to separate himself from the snarling pack and allow his historical revisionism to quietly work its black magic in the background.
Karl Rove is too smart to say he wants Obama to fail. But if Obama's recovery plan doesn't work -- and, if it doesn't, it'll be because it wasn't big and bold enough -- Rove and the gang have a highly polished narrative at the ready, one that succeeds at disconnecting what Obama had to do to stimulate to economy with what happened before he took office. Big government will have failed, according to this narrative. Let's bring back tax cuts and deregulation.
Rove is like Topher Brink, the amoral programmer on Fox's Dollhouse whose job is to erase the memories from the minds of his clients-- and implant new ones.
Republicans have deservedly lost control of the government. And in view of the bankruptcy of their ideas for addressing the crisis we face, they realize their only chance to return to power is to try to change reality and work with the mainstream media to get the public to buy it once more.
That's what makes Rove so dangerous -- his unbending commitment to derailing our understanding of how we've gotten to where we are. He is like the wasp that anesthetizes its victim before it lays its lethal eggs.
