I am not going to call Karl Rove a criminal. In fact, I think it's a shame he has not gotten credit for his true genius. This pudgy little college dropout had a "Eureka" moment that made George Bush president. Twice. And yet nobody seems willing to praise what he's done because to do so you have to mention Joseph Goebbels and that is very politically incorrect.
Now, I do not think Karl Rove is a Nazi, and this is not another attempt to draw an analogy between conservatives and the holocaust. Any such analogy belittles the holocaust and avoids dealing with conservatives by demonizing them, which is what they've been doing to liberals for the past two decades and is itself a form of the "Big Lie", which was the invention of Hitler's evil dwarf, his master of propaganda, that limping anti-Semite, Joseph Goebbels.
The Big Lie, as developed by Goebbels, can be defined in several ways. Definition one: If you say something that is not true, and repeat it often enough, it becomes true in the minds of those who hear it. I call this the Listerine effect. Listerine was originally developed as a topical antiseptic during the Civil War but after Appomattox the market in sucking chest wounds sort of dried up. Listerine had to either reformulate or remarket. So Listerine became a mouthwash, which also qualifies scotch whiskey as a mouthwash.
Definition two: Say something loud enough and your volume alone will produce belief. This might be called the Going out of Business approach. There was an electronics shop on Fifth Avenue that posted frantic going out of business signs in its windows for five straight years. It must have been the most successful business failure in world history. I still went in there expecting a good deal on a TV.
Definition three; a little lie can be easily disproved but a monstrous lie never dies. Monstrous lies are the anti-Semitism lie, the racist, sexist, religious lies and, of course, the lie about wearing clean underwear in case you get hit by a bus and have to go to the emergency room. You'd be surprised how many people who are about to be hit by a bus soil their underwear. And the percentage of people who soil their underwear right after being hit by a bus is virtually one hundred percent - the point being few people arrive at an emergency room wearing clean underwear, no matter how they started the day. And still the lie persists.
Or to define the Big Lie yet another way, you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, and in politics that is usually enough. But the conventional wisdom has always been that Big Lies don't work well in a free press environment because uncovering the truth is profitable. It sells newspapers. It makes the business of news work for the people and not for the politicians. And that is where Karl Rove had his moment of insight.
Let us say you are a politician, a slimy two-faced baby-kisser. And the New York Post has a photograph of you in a gay nightclub with a mouth full. What do you do? Following the old school approach you denounce the photo as faked and the New York Post as a slimy smear machine of a newspaper. If you were following the standard Big Lie approach you would denounce the photo as faked and the New York Post as biased against people of your color/religion/or ethnic origin. But if you were following Karl Rove's super big lie approach you would say nothing. But all of your political allies would immediately begin denouncing at the top of their lungs the presence of Godless Child Molesters in our court houses.
This is not merely changing the subject. And it's not merely telling a big lie. Karl Roves method is telling a big lie about another subject entirely, and doing it every news cycle. So your photo gets buried on page two.
But Karl Rove's genius is that he saw that this repetitive application of telling big lies about different subjects every news cycle not only gave him a political advantage, it allowed him to actually control the press. He became the defacto program director of every news program in America. And he was less expensive and produced more ratings than the truth.
The truth requires research, and it's often dry and filled with numbers. Karl's agendas always hint at soap opera sex, soap opera religion and soap opera politics, with clear villains and heroes. It's so much more satisfying for the viewers than messy reality, where good people can sometimes do bad things and bad people can sometimes be heroes.
Has this really worked? While most Americas are deeply concerned about holding onto their precious health care, Europeans enjoy universal coverage. And we're not talking about that. While many Americans scrimp on prescriptions to make ends meet, Europeans pay 30% of what we do for the same drugs. And we're not talking about it. While our pension plans collapse under the spiraling costs of prescription drugs, draging entire industries down with them, while our entire economy is warped out of shape by gouging profits for Health Care, we obsess about placing the Ten Commandments on the Court House lawn and keeping track of sex offenders displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
Karl Rove is not an evil genius. He is however a genius. His lack of a moral center is no worse than any other politician's lack of a moral center. He's just better at politics than the average politician. In fact, he's so much better than the average politician it's almost a crime.
KAMuston is a freelance writer. He may be contacted at KAMuston@insightbb.com