Spock with a Beard (was: Ferocity and Nihilism)

[PalJoey]

Posted: 7/14/05 at 8:19am

The brilliant Josh Marshall, of TalkingPointsMemo.com, puts his finger on the terror tactics emplyed by Karl Rove and others like him. Read it--it will give you insight into into the "audacious" aggressiveness employed by similar political bullies.

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(July 14, 2005 -- 01:27 AM EDT // link // print)

I think it's only late in the evening, when the email traffic slows and the other distractions fade, that I can really see and marvel at the collosus that is, as Brock calls it, the Republican noise machine, with its ferocity that is only surpassed by its nihilism.

Now we can see in full view what we've seen again and again in recent years, the favored tactic: terror by grand moral inversion, the lie so total and audacious that it almost knocks opponents off their feet.

John Kerry decorated war hero? No, coward and showboat.

We noted yesterday the great article by Josh Green in the Atlantic last year in which Josh chronicled the tactic as Rove practiced it in races he ran down in Alabama in the 1990s. In one state supreme court race his candidate went up against an opponent who'd developed an impeccable reputation on child welfare issues (he was a former family court judge). Once you understand the pattern, the strategy suggests itself. Rove orchestrated a whispering campaign to spread the word that the man was a pedophile. Like I said, audacious.

And so here now. Wilson, a whistleblower administration officials were trying to punish? A whistleblower calling out White House manipulated intelligence during the lead-up to war?

Not at all. Rove was the whistleblower trying to knock down a campaign of disinformation from Joe Wilson. The audacity of it is enough to knock some people off their feet. Like I said, terror by grand moral inversion.

And here we have them on their shows and newsprint boxes, having Plame simultaneously a glorified secretary and also a political operator scheming to upend the president's drive to war by sending her husband on a mission to Niger. What range!

The two words capture it: ferocity and nihilism, feeding off each other.
-- Josh Marshall


Talking Points Memo

Updated On: 7/14/05 at 08:19 AM

[PalJoey]

Posted: 7/14/05 at 10:19am

Another smart post from Billmon. Look for him--he's all over the liberal blogs.

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Spock with a beard

The GOP's propaganda technicians are filling in some of the details of the mirror universe they're trying to create -- the one in which Turdblossom is the noble whistleblower and Joe Wilson and his wife are the sleazy insiders spreading lies and disinformation. And since everything has to be ass backwards in the Republican reality, we're now being told that Wilson, not Rove, is the "leaker" and Dick Cheney, not Valerie Plame, the dedicated public servant damaged by the leak.

Fox News (who else?) takes us through the looking glass:

Cooper's e-mail said Rove warned him away from the idea that Wilson's trip had been authorized by CIA Director George Tenet or Vice President Dick Cheney.

"He gave proper guidance to a reporter who got disinformation in a leak" meant to assign responsibility to Cheney, former Bush aide Ed Rogers told FOX News.

This is starting to resemble that famous Star Trek episode in which Captain Kirk winds up in a parallel universe where the Federation, not the Klingons, are the evil barbarians and Spock has a nasty beard:



(Shudders.) I don't know how far the Rovians plan to take this mirror image building campaign. But I won't be too surprised if we wake up tomorrow to find Bill O'Reilly claiming that Karl Rove used to be an undercover CIA operative (a kind of fat, ugly version of Keifer Sutherland) until he was outed by Valerie Plame -- all as part of a left-wing dirty tricks operation masterminded by Jim Carville.

What Rove is doing here is an example, albeit an extremely weird one, of his standard tactic of attacking his enemy's strength with his most outrageous lies -- the kind that are simply too big and too brazen for most media chicken ****s to call him on.

Painting "straight talk" John McCain as a wacked out ex-POW with a druggie wife and a black love child was one example. Turning John Kerry into a cowardly weasel who lied about his war record was another. And now we have Joe Wilson, the reckless, partisan attack dog who leaks classified information.

There was, of course, no such "leak." Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler (who proves it really is possible to be even handed to a fault) argues that Wilson created the impression that Cheney had a direct hand in the decision to send him to Niger -- an impression the TV morons immediately turned into an accusation.

Maybe. The record seems to show the CIA dispatched Wilson because Cheney kept pushing the spooks for more information on the mythical Niger deal, not in response to a specific request from the vice president's office. But Wilson may have been told differently at the time, or may have remembered the story in a way that tended to magnify his own importance. It's been known to happen.

I mean, it's important to hold public figures accountable for their statements, and Somerby is very good at it. But he seems to think a retired diplomat suddenly caught up in the scandal du jour should be held to the same standard as guys who have made careers out of parsing the truth until it looks like a lie. Wilson definitely has said some things that had to be walked back later. But to put his credibility on the same level as Karl Rove's -- which Somerby seems to be doing now -- is just absurd.

In slamming Wilson, Somerby also places a hell of a lot of weight on the report of the Senate Whitewash Committee -- the same "bipartisan" panel that dropped the second half of its alleged "investigation" of the WMD snipe hunt right down the memory hole.

But that's a topic for another post. The important point here is that whatever Joe Wilson said or didn't say about who sent him to Niger, it wasn't a "leak." He didn't disclose classified information, he didn't do it anonymously, and he sure the hell didn't speak on "double plus secret background." I could also point out that Wilson didn't end the career of an undercover CIA operative and destroy an agency front operation built up over many years at much time and expense. But that would be piling on.

So why are the Rovians going to so much trouble to label Wilson's off-base comments a leak, and persuade the media to do likewise?

To confuse the issue, of course. It's what you do when the other side has drawn first blood, and looks like it's going to draw a couple of pints more. The goal is to confront the public with two sides hurling identical charges at each other -- the better to convince them that it's just another partisan mudfight and who the hell knows who the real leaker is anyway. Change the channel, Edna.

This is a classic disinformation technique, and one Rove has used before -- although not as often as the stealth slime attack, which still seems to be his favorite (to the point of revealing some pretty creepy kinks in his personality. God only knows what Karl saw peeping through all those boyhood keyholes.)

The Rovians used the mirror image gambit against former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke -- accusing him of sleeping through the summer of 2001, and claiming he failed to alert his bosses to the gathering threat of an attack. They used it against Kerry to neutralize the AWOL issue. And they used it against Bill Clinton (and any other Democratic politician they could find among "Kenny Boy" Lay's golfing partners) during the Enron scandal.

But I don't think the gang has ever used the technique on this massive a scale before. On his most megalomaniacal day ever, Dick Nixon would never have dreamed of trying to spin his squalid dirty tricks operation into a heroic blow for truth, justice and the American way. It has a kind of totalitarian grandeur to it -- like Stalin turning himself into the leader of the Russian Revolution and Trotsky, creator of the Red Army, into a filthy capitalist spy.

There have probably been bigger liars than Karl Rove in the long, sad history of American politics -- Roy Cohn and LBJ come to mind, for example. But I can't think of any who have had such maximal ambitions, or such powerful propaganda tools at their disposal.

For everybody's sake, though, I hope Rove doesn't go all the way with this operation. Living in his mirror image world would be a real pain -- after a lifetime of right-handedness, I don't think I could get used to being a southpaw. And the "good guys" already act too much like the "bad guys." I don't need any more confusion.

Besides, the idea of Karl Rove with a goatee is way too much for any sane person to handle.
posted by Billmon at 11:29 PM | link
Spock with a beard

[Unknown User]

Posted: 7/14/05 at 10:49am

Yep-- It's the "Big Lie" theory writ even larger.

And what's really astounding is the way they are able to paint themselves as the "Powerless Victim," helpless as the big, mean, powerful Liberal Democratic Attack machine stops the war on terror and brings the poor, helpless White House to a halt, all to play 'partisan politics' games with an innocent man.

Of course they do have the total and complete assistance of the the most powerful news channel, 24 hours a day. What was Fox covering last night, anyway? Was it the Liberal attempt to seat a transgendered illigal alien lesbian in Rehnquist's seat or where there developments from Aruba that needed examaning? I can bet they didn't spend a lot of time talking about Rove.