Rove Is Full of Bovine Manure
Mon Aug 20, 2007 at 08:48:40 AM PDT
A moderate Republican friend mine my was feeling a wee bit celebratory about Rove’s handling of his Meet the Press interview with NBC White House correspondent David Gregory. He sent my this fairly perceptive email on how Rove managed to get the upper hand in the interview (unedited):
our affection for him is probably similar, but we differ regarding the appreciation of his intellect. given the very poor political position he and his party are in he was never touched by the russert's stand in.
while vulnerable on the discussed topics ... the 2006 election results, iraq, 9/11, immigration & social security reform failures, cheney's flip-flop of the '94 position against an iraq invasion, miscalculation of the costs of the war and the ability of iraq revenues to cover it, his treasonous Plame disclosure, and avoidance of testimony because of executive privilege ... rove never took a hit.
he even used the national broadcast as an opportunity to point out all of hillary's negatives as the demo front runner. while a correspondent of the calibre of Moyers or Schieffer would never have let rove assume such control of the interview, that bush's brain emerged from that discussion unscathed speaks to his malignant brilliance.
My email back to my liberal leaning Republican friend:
I'm not sure that Karl Rove's ownership of David Gregory proves his brilliance. Gregory is only 35 years old and Rove was handling prickly reporters before David Gregory was born.
Gregory's problem was that he was all over the map with his subject matter and appeared to be desperate to goad Rove into saying too much about any given topic. As a well seasoned political operative Rove knows how to deflect a reporter's probe questions by closing down the subject. Rove frequently would make his final point and then push Gregory to move on to the next question. It's called controlling the tempo of an interview and nearly anyone who effectively uses logical fallacies of debate can appear to be commanding the interview.
Gregory simply lacked the rhetorical skills to point out the contradictions of Rove's responses and reframe with a powerful probe question. Tim Russert or Bill Moyers have enough experience at handling long winded political operatives to push back and force a guy like Rove to be forthcoming on his responses. Gregory was afraid of creating conflict by being too assertive and didn't have the confidence to challenge Rove's patently false talking points.
It's a daunting challenge to prove Rove is playing fast and loose with the truth. You end up looking like looking like a whiny disgruntled liberal with a chip on his shoulder if you actually start pointing out every misstatement of fact that comes out of his mouth.
One has to critique Rove's entire modus operandi. Indeed,these methods prove optimal for exposing any number of Rovian techniques, ranging from cooked statistics, to guilt by association, to tactical foul play, to lies by omission, to misquoting experts, to quoting sources that don't exist, to Rove's constant use of baffling logorrhea. To own Karl Rove you have to challenge the methods he uses to sandbag you.
Harry J. Frankfrut’s treatise On Bullshit is a great antidote to Rove’s constant use of bullshit. To own a ideologue like Rove, is not simply a matter of observing the tide and eddies in an unending stream of bullshit. It also means trawling through that same discharge in order to extract any number of dangerous lies.
90% of Rove's lies are carefully worded and nuanced statements that omit or add to the message of a truthful statement to transform it into a lie. Rove is constantly selecting only the those facts which support the three legged chair of truth that he's building, while he tosses out all evidence of facts to the contrary.
Remember how Tim Russert owned George W. Bush in the MtP interview on February 7, 2004?. About the only thing Bush can do well is close down a reporter when he knows he's getting into dangerous waters. Bush was so far out of his element he was trapped by Russert in several lies and kept repeating over and over "I'm a war president," as if being a war president is universal pardon for incompetence and being a war president is an exemption from making truthful statements.
Bush looked so bad, the White House requested that a verbatim transcript of the interview should not be available to the public for (you guessed it!) national security reasons. So Russert's interview with President Bush it isn't available in transcript form anywhere and when you go to the MTP website all you get is White House approved excerpts from the interview. George W. Bush hasn't appeared on Meet the Press in the nearly 4 years since that interview.
Both Bush and Rove knew that Russert was too powerful a figure to take to the woodshed as he did with Irish reporter Carol Coleman when she behaved in the same manner Russert did, 5 months later in an Erie Television interview.
I just got a hold of the Meet the Press transcript of the Rove interview and noticed dozens of subjective opinions passed off as fact that went unchallenged by David Gregory. These are all quotes from Rove in yesterday’s MtP interview.
On Bush’s accomplishments:
Our party, when this president came in, we faced a recession, we had corporate scandals, we had an attack on our, on our homeland on 9/11 that devastated our economy. A million people lost their jobs in the aftermath of 9/11. This president and Republicans in Congress cut taxes and have given us four years of very strong economic growth. Our economy is dynamic and powerful, providing jobs and increases in real income for people.
Karl is going to have to show me the money on that entire statement. For every accomplishment he is claiming, there is even more compelling evidence that Bush failed on each one of those triumphs that Rove is laying claim to.
On the post 9/11 mindset:
There are all kinds of contingencies that are discussed and, and, and evaluated and planned for and thought about. And—but look, the world changed. Again, I repeat, it is fine to have a 1994 mind-set in 1994. It is not longer acceptable to have a 1994 mind-set after September 11th. America We face a brutal enemy who will kill the innocent for one purpose and that is to gain control of the Middle East and to use the leverage of oil to bring down the West, and to attack us again. needs to think and act differently.
I can’t believe Gregory let him get away saying the sentence I’ve underlined. Remember how the White House was falling all over itself to adamantly deny that the war in Iraq wasn’t about oil? Now Mr. Rove is telling us that the purpose of the Iraq war is to keep terrorist from gaining control of the Middle East to use the leverage of oil to "bring down the West and to attack us again.
On the faked British intelligence memo about Saddam’s efforts to obtain yellow cake uranium from Niger:
MR. ROVE: We also know that he (Joe Wilson) did—he came—the information he came back with was not dispositive, was not conclusive, did not disprove the British intelligence finding that the Iraqis had attempted to acquire uranium cake. In fact, we now know that he brought back information not disclosed in his article that added to the belief, that confirmed the British intelligence report that the Iraqis had attempted to acquire uranium cake. He brought back information about a previously unknown contact where the Iraqis, working through a third party, attempted to bring and did bring to Niger a trade delegation. And since the only thing Niger had to sell was uranium cake that was on a U.N. sanctions list, they declined to do any business. He brought back information that affirmed the, the British intelligence report. After this all came out, the British did a study, did a review, appointed a commission to review their intelligence finding and came back and confirmed that they stood by their original assessment that, that Iraq had attempted to acquire uranium yellow cake from Niger in—and exactly as was in the president’s speech.
This is simply a flat out lie. Note how Rove said "the British did a study, appointed commission to review their intelligence finding and ...confirm that they stood by their original assessment that Iraq had attempted to acquire yellow cake from Niger in exactly as it was describe in the president’s speech. Who is Rove talking about when he refers to "the British? He fails to mention any names of British government committees or the names of British politicians or citizens that were involved in the commission. Rove states as fact:" the British" reversed the original finding that the yellow cake uranium member and Bush was accurate in his call to arms speech accusing Saddam. I spent nearly two hours using search engines and news analysis websites to find out who Rove is referring to when he cites "the British" but came up empty handed. David Gregory should have nailed Rove to the wall for that statement. Rove was using the old Goebbels propaganda tactic of the Big Lie e.g. create a such an extravagant lie that it's impossible to disprove the inaccuracy of it. In other words you dismantle the entire meta-system of truth, as we know it.
There are at least a dozen misstatements of facts (or lies, depending on your perspective) and Rove crept past Gregory on all of them. In the interest of my time I won’t document any more but I will follow up on analyzing the transcript.
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