Karl Rove's America

[Guest guest]

The USA has been taken over by an extremist right wing cabal. It has

entered the age of " 1984 " of newspeak where up is down, good is bad,

truth is lies, honesty is deceit, war is peace, etc. F.

 

 

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/opinion/15krugman.html?pagewanted=print

 

July 15, 2005

Karl Rove's America

By PAUL KRUGMAN

 

John Gibson of Fox News says that Karl Rove should be given a medal. I

agree: Mr. Rove should receive a medal from the American Political

Science Association for his pioneering discoveries about modern

American politics. The medal can, if necessary, be delivered to his

prison cell.

 

What Mr. Rove understood, long before the rest of us, is that we're

not living in the America of the past, where even partisans sometimes

changed their views when faced with the facts. Instead, we're living

in a country in which there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical

truth. In particular, there are now few, if any, limits to what

conservative politicians can get away with: the faithful will follow

the twists and turns of the party line with a loyalty that would have

pleased the Comintern.

 

I first realized that we were living in Karl Rove's America during the

2000 presidential campaign, when George W. Bush began saying things

about Social Security privatization and tax cuts that were simply

false. At first, I thought the Bush campaign was making a big mistake

- that these blatant falsehoods would be condemned by prominent

Republican politicians and Republican economists, especially those who

had spent years building reputations as advocates of fiscal

responsibility. In fact, with hardly any exceptions they lined up to

praise Mr. Bush's proposals.

 

But the real demonstration that Mr. Rove understands American politics

better than any pundit came after 9/11.

 

Every time I read a lament for the post-9/11 era of national unity, I

wonder what people are talking about. On the issues I was watching,

the Republicans' exploitation of the atrocity began while ground zero

was still smoldering.

 

Mr. Rove has been much criticized for saying that liberals responded

to the attack by wanting to offer the terrorists therapy - but what he

said about conservatives, that they " saw the savagery of 9/11 and the

attacks and prepared for war, " is equally false. What many of them

actually saw was a domestic political opportunity - and none more so

than Mr. Rove.

 

A less insightful political strategist might have hesitated right

after 9/11 before using it to cast the Democrats as weak on national

security. After all, there were no facts to support that accusation.

 

But Mr. Rove understood that the facts were irrelevant. For one thing,

he knew he could count on the administration's supporters to

obediently accept a changing story line. Read the before-and-after

columns by pro-administration pundits about Iraq: before the war they

castigated the C.I.A. for understating the threat posed by Saddam's

W.M.D.; after the war they castigated the C.I.A. for exaggerating the

very same threat.

 

Mr. Rove also understands, better than anyone else in American

politics, the power of smear tactics. Attacks on someone who

contradicts the official line don't have to be true, or even

plausible, to undermine that person's effectiveness. All they have to

do is get a lot of media play, and they'll create the sense that there

must be something wrong with the guy.

 

And now we know just how far he was willing to go with these smear

tactics: as part of the effort to discredit Joseph Wilson IV, Mr. Rove

leaked the fact that Mr. Wilson's wife worked for the C.I.A. I don't

know whether Mr. Rove can be convicted of a crime, but there's no

question that he damaged national security for partisan advantage. If

a Democrat had done that, Republicans would call it treason.

 

But what we're getting, instead, is yet another impressive

demonstration that these days, truth is political. One after another,

prominent Republicans and conservative pundits have declared their

allegiance to the party line. They haven't just gone along with the

diversionary tactics, like the irrelevant questions about whether Mr.

Rove used Valerie Wilson's name in identifying her (Robert Novak later

identified her by her maiden name, Valerie Plame), or the false,

easily refuted claim that Mr. Wilson lied about who sent him to Niger.

They're now a chorus, praising Mr. Rove as a patriotic whistle-blower.

 

Ultimately, this isn't just about Mr. Rove. It's also about Mr. Bush,

who has always known that his trusted political adviser - a disciple

of the late Lee Atwater, whose smear tactics helped President Bush's

father win the 1988 election - is a thug, and obviously made no

attempt to find out if he was the leaker.

 

Most of all, it's about what has happened to America. How did our

political system get to this point?

 

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