Repeat After Me

The following is posted predicated on consensus on the primary principle of previous post, namely Karl Rove is secondary. Civilization would have progressed further had his parents been forbidden to breed, there is no denying. There are folks on death row whose character shines in comparison to his, I have no doubt. I will resist temptation to go on. You know. If there is a deity, It knows. Karma happens.

Try on this (excerpted) editorial at Buzzflash:

From the beginning of BuzzFlash, we have said this again and again: the core of Bushevism propaganda is that if you repeat a lie five times, it becomes the truth.

Remember this, it doesn't matter how bold and audacious the lie is, they stick to the repetition. In fact, the more brazen the lie -- the more it defies common sense -- the more likely many Americans who rely on television for news are likely to believe it. That is because a plainspoken person wouldn't believe that anyone "like them" would lie so contrary to the truth. It's just not something a person in their right mind would do, unless they are fundamentally amoral, ruthless, and love power more than their country.

But that is why Ken Mehlman, RNC Chair, went on Sunday television to defiantly warn Democrats to apologize for slandering Rove. No, we are not making this up. It is tempting to laugh, but people believe these lies in defense of treason; that's how we got in this mess.

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The Democrats should stop calling for Rove to resign and instead take a page from the GOP/Luntz playbook. Just keep saying Rove and treason together in as many possible media forums as possible. Everyone knows the Democrats want Rove to resign. That's not a message that gets embedded in the public mind. It's only a tactic that feeds into the Rove strategy of throwing up enough flak to confuse people and have the media report on this as a partisan fight, rather than an act of betraying the national security interests of the United States of America.

Rove's outing of Plame has made us all less safe, seriously less safe. Because she specialized in the tracking the illicit sales of Weapons of Mass Destruction. People's lives have been endangered as a result of the White House's betrayal.

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Everyone knows that the Rove "counterattack" (even though the White House lies again when it claims it can't talk about the case but unleashes Rove to furiously impugn Joe Wilson and throw up enough flak to keep the press befuddled) is about three things: 1) Saving Bush's Brain, Karl Rove, from the slammer, which would leave Bush with a frontal lobotomy; 2) Keeping the dam of Bushevik lies that led us into the Iraq war from bursting forth and finally being understood as a treason and betrayal unto itself; and 3) protecting the one-party power base of the Bush dynasty, the rabid Republicans, and the Fundamentalist Christian Jihadists.

Just remember these two words: Rove and treason.

Repeat the truth five times and people might finally understand it's the truth.


Did you notice the words "unless they are fundamentally amoral, ruthless, and love power more than their country"? CLICK! Pattern-match.

Repeat after me (5x, preferably): "Rove and treason."

Originating just about as far away as one can get in the lower 48 from the now woefully out-of-touch corporations-uber-alles world that non-representative Washington has become, here's an interesting snippet from the "other Washington":

Two years ago, Ambassador Joe Wilson chose a forum in Seattle to suggest that presidential strategist Karl Rove was the leaker who had "outed" Wilson's wife as a CIA agent in retaliation for the ambassador's criticism of White House Iraq policy.

"Wouldn't it be fun to see Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs?" he asked at that meeting.

The line brought a roaring ovation from 1,000 Seattle-area liberals, but a frosty reaction from his wife when Wilson returned home to Washington, D.C.

Today, Wilson can't say if Rove committed a crime, but believes he has behaved "below the minimum standards of ethical conduct we expect of a public official," and has no business working at the White House.

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"This has been a smear campaign that just keeps on giving," said Wilson, who served as ambassador to Gabon and chief U.S. diplomat in Baghdad during the days leading up to Gulf War I.

His career was launched right here -- while working as a carpenter in Sequim, Wilson came to Seattle for the exam that led to his 22-year Foreign Service career.

"No man is above the law, not even the president's chief adviser," Wilson said.

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Beware: It's All in the Hands

Personally, it's even more fun to imagine Karl Rove considering an application for a witness protection program (okay, in this case perhaps "felon" may work better than "witness") than it was to watch Little Scottie dancing on the hot griddle with reporters a week ago.

Anyone interested in Reality Life should be attentive to Matt Cooper's exclusive for Time Magazine regarding his grand jury testimony on the Plame affair:

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As for Wilson's wife, I told the grand jury I was certain that Rove never used her name and that, indeed, I did not learn her name until the following week, when I either saw it in Robert Novak's column or Googled her, I can't recall which. Rove did, however, clearly indicate that she worked at the "agency"--by that, I told the grand jury, I inferred that he obviously meant the CIA and not, say, the Environmental Protection Agency. Rove added that she worked on "WMD" (the abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction) issues and that she was responsible for sending Wilson. This was the first time I had heard anything about Wilson's wife.

Rove never once indicated to me that she had any kind of covert status. I told the grand jury something else about my conversation with Rove. Although it's not reflected in my notes or subsequent e-mails, I have a distinct memory of Rove ending the call by saying, "I've already said too much." This could have meant he was worried about being indiscreet, or it could have meant he was late for a meeting or something else. I don't know, but that sign-off has been in my memory for two years.

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But while joy far beyond anyone in Mudville imagined would likely ensue were justice to catch up with dirty trickster Karl, it seems perilous to focus too narrowly on him. With blind loyalty the premier virtue in this executive house of venality, I can easily imagine a scenario wherein Karl takes a pseudo-fall, relinquishing official title and tendering a resignation, effectively clearing the slate of all the evil that has been closely linked to him. He is abhorrent of course, and the embodiment of much that is despicable, but we must not allow him to take on the role of sole pustule of the anti-human disease that is epidemic throughout bushdom. Let's face it; KR could disappear tomorrow and bushworld would still be a truly awful place.

So, in the spirit of not letting Karl off the hook but most urgently not letting his hand-waving lead our eyes away from the real toxic source-matter, it was a great relief today to read upfront summaries in several familiar but lately derelict mainstream news sources.

For example, Frank Rich, one of the few remaining anchors of the minority progressive voice at the New York Times, had a great OpEd piece with the catchy title Follow the Uranium:

WELL, of course, Karl Rove did it. He may not have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, with its high threshold of criminality for outing a covert agent, but there's no doubt he trashed Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame. We know this not only because of Matt Cooper's e-mail, but also because of Mr. Rove's own history. Trashing is in his nature, and bad things happen, usually through under-the-radar whispers, to decent people (and their wives) who get in his way. In the 2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain's wife, Cindy, was rumored to be a drug addict (and Senator McCain was rumored to be mentally unstable). In the 1994 Texas governor's race, Ann Richards found herself rumored to be a lesbian. The implication that Mr. Wilson was a John Kerry-ish girlie man beholden to his wife for his meal ticket is of a thematic piece with previous mud splattered on Rove political adversaries. The difference is that this time Mr. Rove got caught.

Even so, we shouldn't get hung up on him - or on most of the other supposed leading figures in this scandal thus far. Not Matt Cooper or Judy Miller or the Wilsons or the bad guy everyone loves to hate, the former CNN star Robert Novak. This scandal is not about them in the end, any more than Watergate was about Dwight Chapin and Donald Segretti or Woodward and Bernstein. It is about the president of the United States. It is about a plot that was hatched at the top of the administration and in which everyone else, Mr. Rove included, are at most secondary players.

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And even the Washington Post, rarely these days finding the courage to question power on even the mildest of issues, apparently finally found the discomforting hairball-like feeling from excessive reality-suppression too much to hold down:

Karl Rove had a secret.

In public, he was masterminding President Bush's reelection and brushing off suggestions he had played any part in an unfolding drama: the unmasking of CIA operative Valerie Plame. In private, the senior White House adviser was meeting, on five occasions, with federal prosecutors to tell what he knew about the matter.

The story he would tell prosecutors did not seem to square with the White House's denial that it had played any role in one of the most famous leaks since Watergate. Rove told prosecutors he had discussed Plame in passing with at least two reporters, including the columnist who eventually revealed her name and role in a secret mission that would raise questions about Bush's case for war against Iraq. At the same time, other White House officials were whispering about Plame, too.

It is now clear: There has been an element of pretense to the White House strategy of dealing with the Plame case since the earliest days of the saga. Revelations emerging slowly at first, and in a rapid cascade over the past several days, have made plain that many important pieces of the puzzle were not so mysterious to Rove and others inside the Bush administration. White House officials were aware of Plame and her husband's potentially damaging charge that Bush was "twisting" intelligence about Iraq's nuclear ambitions well before the episode evolved into Washington's latest scandal.

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