Tuesday, June 28
the inimitable Billmon
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"Rove is falling back on his classic strategy of rallying the base. What's more, he's mainlining it a much rawer and more savage version of the conservative message than the White House usually permits itself. While the customary surrogates -- Fox News, Rush, the blogger hyena pack -- have snarled and snapped, the results apparently have been found wanting. Now Bush's "brain" is stepping into the ring himself.
But, like fellow psychopath Mike Tyson, Rove isn't just telegraphing his punches, he's also displaying the depths of his fear. The rhetorical ear chewing and head butting is a clear sign the champ doesn't have the juice any more, and knows it. Rove is trying to get by on sheer intimidation. He's pushing as many primordial conservative buttons as he can -- leaning on them, in fact -- in hopes he can once again make the dreaded liberals the story, not the march of folly currently sinking into the Iraqi quicksands...
The long, sad history of the human species has amply demonstrated that a scapegoat doesn't have to be credible in order to be believable, as long as the target audience is predisposed to believe it. Conservatives have spent the better part of the past four decades writing "liberals" -- a suitably abstract synonym for "enemy" -- into the same role filled in other times and places by the Elders of Zion. And two generations of Americans have absorbed the poisonous brew, either directly or indirectly. It is (along with dirty money) the bitch's milk of the modern GOP machine.
All along, the bedrock of Rove's political "philosophy" has been the conviction that propaganda will always trump reality -- as long as the desired message is consistent with existing popular myths and prejudices. And his preferred tool for meshing the two has always been the conservative base and the enormous gravitational pull it exerts on the weak-minded middle.
Now, finally, that strategy appears to be crashing onto the rocks of a losing (if not already lost) war in Iraq. But it's worth remembering that the Rovians have been right much more often than they've been wrong about the gullibility and ignorance of both the corporate media and the mushy middle. Maybe that time is past. Maybe, like Tyson, the propaganda machine has pounded itself into exhaustion -- its impotence exposed for all to see.
Maybe. Like I said, the sheer volume and (dare I say it?) shrill hysteria of the current conservative hate campaign is itself a positive sign. But I'll believe the machine is finished only when I see Rove's flabby carcass stretched out cold on the canvas.
And we're not there yet. Not by a long shot."
(And if you despise this logic, don't go here:http://billmon.org/archives/001936.html)
Also,
http://news.google.com/news?svnum=10&hl=en&ned=us&ie=ISO-8859-1&as_qdr=&as_drrb=b&as_mind=22&as_minm=6&as_maxd=31&as_maxm=6&q=%22Karl+Rove%22
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