I just got home from work, and looked at
google news (my afternoon ritual). And behold my tired eyes is this title:
How dumb do they think we are?
Of course I knew it was about the Rove leak affair before clicking, but I wanted to see if there was anything new.
And if you couldn't figure it out from the title the MSM dropped the "L" bomb. You know, the word NO politician wants to be associated with...lie.
Go read the article, or read excerpts and comments below the fold.
First of all the article starts like this:
WASHINGTON (Creators Syndicate) -- In my line of work, you get lied to a lot.
Hot damn...Mark Shields just used lie 8 words into his piece. God I love it when people start cutting through the shit and say what everyone's saying around the water coolers.
To continue:
There are the generally forgettable fibs, like a senator who's making his seventh political trip to New Hampshire since the first of the year insisting he has made no decision about a White House run.
The falsehoods you remember are bold and brassy.
So from here he goes on about a couple of GHW Bush and Clinton's lies before coming back to the present.
In returning he hits us with the great quote:
Today in Washington, the big, barefaced lie is very much back.
As if it was ever gone out of style. But I'm still damn pleased as punch that someone has finally called this administration on it lies, even if it's a bit late.
So he covers a bit of background that I shouldn't need to note here to get to the heart of the story, which I'll share uninterrupted:
Are you ready for a barefaced lie? Listen to the Republican talking points. It is true that Rove did talk to Matt Cooper. But he was not trying to smear Wilson and thus silence a formidable critic of Bush's Iraq policy.
No, Rove's only motive was to make sure that Cooper and Time did not publish something that could turn out to be false. This is a side of the man we have not seen before -- selflessly saving gullible newsmen from publishing anything inaccurate.
Imagine how busy Rove must have been during Bush's 1994 race for Texas governor, when his campaign was accused of launching a whispering campaign in East Texas about Democratic Gov. Ann Richards' affinity for gays. Try as he must have, Karl just couldn't stop the circulation of those ugly rumors.
In 2000,George W. Bush's campaign was accused of spreading the vicious charge that Bush's main rival, Sen. John McCain, was unstable because of the time he had spent as a POW in isolation.
You just know Karl must have been speed-dialing reporters, valiantly trying to kill that slander. In 2004, the man who bankrolled the Swift Boat Veterans against John Kerry was one of Rove's oldest Texas allies.
Wayne Slater of The Dallas Morning News, who has covered Rove long and well, puts it this way: "Throughout his political career, bad things happen -- sometimes involving dirty tricks -- to his enemies or rivals." Is that because he's evil? "He's amoral. He doesn't set up a plan to damage, defeat or destroy his enemies because he's evil. He does it because he's so unbelievably competitive and amoral."
All of this raises one nagging question: Just how dumb do the Bush people believe we are, that we would swallow, for even a nanosecond, the fabrication that Karl Rove's only motive in calling reporters was to discourage inaccurate stories? Do they really think we are that stupid?
And to answer Mark's question: yes, I believe the do think we're that stupid. I mean after 4+ years in the WH, and getting away with similar lies (not to count those from before) why shouldn't they.
Of course I could rant on about how the MSM played into this belief by not calling them out sooner, but I think I'll just revel in the fact that they finally found some cojones up there in Warshington.
Again here's the link to the story.