If it wasn't Karl Rove and his crew, it would be somebody else, some other group of crackpot propagandists with a bankroll doing everything possible to reverse the recent tentative loosening of the grip the right-wing juggernaut has on our nation's throat.
The right has one thing that the left would do well to emulate: It doesn't give up. It doesn't see a defeat or a series of defeats as an excuse to retreat into despair. It doesn't get all introspective and start devouring its own. Instead, it redoubles its previous efforts. Of course, those efforts epitomize the politics of destruction, something we on the left don't want to emulate. Ultimately, the agenda boils down to advancing the class war. It seeks more targets. It exaggerates, fabricates, invents, concocts and lies. It works to squelch whatever gains its foes have made toward a more humane world.
In other words, the right operates just as it has always done.
It has never lacked for financial resources. The fellows who benefit most from the class war can be quite generous when it isn't the wages of rank-and-file Americans they're being generous to. As Justin Elliott at Salon writes today, four of them have plunked down a huge wad of cash into Karl Rove's "grassroots" organization, American Crossroads. In fact, 97 percent of $4.7 million the group has collected has come from these four.
The IRS filing of American Crossroads, an outside 527 group that was conceived by Rove and ex-RNC chair Ed Gillespie, gives a good taste of who is funding the GOP effort to make big gains in the House and Senate come the fall. The group has already burned through $600,000 on ads attacking Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is facing a reelection contest against Republican Sharron Angle (see one of the spots below). Chaired by another ex-RNC chair, Mike Duncan, American Crossroads has pledged to raise $50 million to beat Democrats in the midterms and has been seen by some as a competitor to the Republican National Committee itself.
There are no limits on how much corporations, unions, and individuals can donate to 527 groups.
The big donors: Trevor Rees-Jones, president of Dallas-based Chief Oil and Gas $1 million; Bradley Wayne Hughes, chairman of Public Storage Inc, $1.55 million to date; Harold Simmons, owner of Southwest Louisiana Land LLC; Robert Rowling, owner of TRT Holdings, $1 million.
Ultimately, whether it's American Crossroads, or some other group, whether it's Karl Rove or some other well-known or mostly invisible operator, we're going to see a lot more of these "grassroots" attacks.
