Karl Rove is a master of timing.
Like Machiavelli, Rove has the formula: Let all the bad news out at the time it will do the most "good" in distracting your opponents... and at the time it will do the least "harm" -- when nobody can do anything about it, and all will have forgotten it by the time it really matters. Give your opponents a false sense of power and momentum, then drop the floor from under them at just the moment before you orchestrate the act that really matters in the real chess game.
And, today, we got had yet again by the Rovian manipulator.
Tomorrow, Pawn gets promoted to Queen.
But the deeper... (continued below the fold)
...understanding eludes the progressive movement, and until we penetrate & deeply understand what we are up against, we are in for more than just upsetting surprises & repeated disappointments.
History unfolds over longer timespans than human attention spans.
OTOH, as Rove so well knows, the hand is quicker than the eye.
So tomorrow, the day of Alito's confirmation, is just a milestone, a milestone along a major historic sweep.
What milestone? Majority control of all the separated branches. House & Senate, SCOTUS & POTUS.
Just in time for the 2006 "springtime surprise" that Rove promised his faithful back during his darkest of days last summer/fall.
If we don't wise up, he'll keep doing it to us. With each cut, we may find we have less of a leg to stand on.
Our collective memory is better than my own, so feel free to post examples below, but here are just a few to get us started.
In the run up to Nov 2004, Rove allowed his full strength to become less visible, and at times Kerry seemed to pull ahead. You remember the adrenaline rushes as we surged toward victory --- several times, even again in the last hours of election night. But Rove knew he had it wired each time, whether it was the depth of his fundamentalist GOTV or his pin-point dirty tricks or his ultimate control of the Diebold backdoors and MSAccess vote databases.
With Plame & Wilson, it wasn't just a matter of Rove doing his treasonous deeds. He orchestrated events so that he & Libby became lightning rods (but notice that Rove lost nothing in the deal), taking the heat off from Bush & Cheney, and attention away from where we should have been looking, and distracting attention to where he wanted us to waste our time and energy. The Miers saga was staged ("a spat between friends") for the same purpose; there was no way Miers was ever intended to really make it to SCOTUS.
They threw us some bones in the election that matters absolutely the least in the cycle. They dumped (allowed to come out) tons & tons of scandal news onto the media in a short period this past season (Fitzmas season/CIA, NSA/Domestic Spying, torture, Abramoff, etc, etc) to manipulate public opinion and limited attention span so that it will be neutralized (boring, business as usual, "old news") by the time it matters (2006 elections, upcoming Iran action, and whatever other goodies they've got scheduled).
Each time he made a prediction, things for awhile went the other way, his opponents (us) become overconfident, and then somehow "miraculously" events turned out just as he predicted... and he accomplishes yet another cycle of hammering our morale. Manipulating & reshaping how we play the political game.
How upset is he with Bush's low ratings? Well, when you master the dynamics of building momentum, you begin to enjoy building upwards from a low base. "Pump & dump" stock market manipulators do it all the time, and profit over & over.
When he controls the backdoors to the electonic voting, AND the court of last resort for any voting challenges, he is reshaping the game board... while at the same time we are still moving our little playing pieces past Boardwalk, and jazzed with our new prowess to raise grassroots monies to pay the bigtime media rent when we land on Park Place.
What are we up against? And how deep must be the rethink to regain a genuine edge?
Or, as the say in Go, "SENTE".
Anyway, Rove et al have said to us, "ATARI".
Are we listening? Do we understand?
So, shall we make a Catalog of Rovian Tricks, anyone?