Why bother?
I haven't written anything about Karl Rove's comments last week in New York City partly because I know the only reason Rove said such disparaging things about liberals was because:
• President Bush is tanking in the polls;
• Support for the war is at an all-time low;
• Conservatives just got reamed in the battle over judicial nominees;
• The public ain't buying the administration's Social Security plan.
It's bait-and-switch, pure and simple. Heck, if I was getting as much bad news as the administration, I'd want to change the topic too. They probably did a jig in the Oval Office when the media picked up the Michael Jackson verdict because it meant they weren't the lead story on the news again.
But, despite what I have said here, I do have to vent just a tad about Rove's ignorant comments and the completely illogical defense of what he said by damn near the entire GOP establishment.
This country was united in compassion, grief, sorrow and anger in the aftermath of 9/11. To suggest otherwise, as Rove did, is completely foolish. To suggest that the overwhelming majority of liberals — and Democrats, as he implied, despite all of his wiggling in the past few days — didn't realize that some entity, be it a terrorist organization or a hostile nation, was now at war with us is foolish. To try and clarify that you only meant Moveon.org, as Rove and his defenders are asserting, is to intentionally mislead the public and succumb to pride by failing to admit that you committed a verbal gaffe in the speech.
To suggest that those who share a different ideology, a different political philosophy, are sympathetic to terrorists is foolish, ignorant and are merely the remarks of a stupid man who is ever-so-slowly losing his grip on power.
Truth be told, this liberal - rightly or wrongly - watched the towers crumble and, in one of the many thoughts and emotions racing through my head, kept thinking 'we're going to kick somebody's ass.' Like my friend at Thought Struggle - who isn't a full-fledged liberal, but is my no means conservative - I cut out an editorial cartoon depicting Uncle Sam, his legs being the smoldering ruins of the towers, hoisting up his sleeves and preparing for a fight. Like Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts - again, a liberal who is no fan of this administration - I hung up his column written in the wake of 9/11 which contained this passage:
You see, the steel in us is not always readily apparent. That aspect of our character is seldom understood by people who don't know us well. On this day, the family's bickering is put on hold.
As Americans we will weep, as Americans we will mourn, and as Americans, we will rise in defense of all that we cherish.
So I ask again: What was it you hoped to teach us? It occurs to me that maybe you just wanted us to know the depths of your hatred. If that's the case, consider the message received. And take this message in exchange: You don't know my people. You don't know what we're capable of. You don't know what you just started.
But you're about to learn.
You tell me Karl Rove ... do these sound like the words of someone who desired moderation and counseling for our enemies?
Perhaps that's what I resent most about this administation - that they saw the country come together, they despised it and sought to split it into a million fractious pieces for cheap, political gain. They saw a unified nation, people of all types of political and philosophical persuasions, and worked hard to undermine that unity through divisive actions on the domestic and international fronts.
Karl Rove doesn't know me. He doesn't know the people of New York City either - perhaps the most liberal city on the planet - because if did, he would have thought twice before uttering such a pathetic excuse for propaganda. He doesn't know the millions of liberals - moderate ones and far-left ones - who backed this nation's assault on Al-Qaida. He doesn't know the countless numbers of liberals who make up the ranks of our Armed Forces, and who are dying daily in a conflict we created in Iraq.
Karl Rove doesn't know me ... and he better be pretty damn glad he doesn't.
• President Bush is tanking in the polls;
• Support for the war is at an all-time low;
• Conservatives just got reamed in the battle over judicial nominees;
• The public ain't buying the administration's Social Security plan.
It's bait-and-switch, pure and simple. Heck, if I was getting as much bad news as the administration, I'd want to change the topic too. They probably did a jig in the Oval Office when the media picked up the Michael Jackson verdict because it meant they weren't the lead story on the news again.
But, despite what I have said here, I do have to vent just a tad about Rove's ignorant comments and the completely illogical defense of what he said by damn near the entire GOP establishment.
This country was united in compassion, grief, sorrow and anger in the aftermath of 9/11. To suggest otherwise, as Rove did, is completely foolish. To suggest that the overwhelming majority of liberals — and Democrats, as he implied, despite all of his wiggling in the past few days — didn't realize that some entity, be it a terrorist organization or a hostile nation, was now at war with us is foolish. To try and clarify that you only meant Moveon.org, as Rove and his defenders are asserting, is to intentionally mislead the public and succumb to pride by failing to admit that you committed a verbal gaffe in the speech.
To suggest that those who share a different ideology, a different political philosophy, are sympathetic to terrorists is foolish, ignorant and are merely the remarks of a stupid man who is ever-so-slowly losing his grip on power.
Truth be told, this liberal - rightly or wrongly - watched the towers crumble and, in one of the many thoughts and emotions racing through my head, kept thinking 'we're going to kick somebody's ass.' Like my friend at Thought Struggle - who isn't a full-fledged liberal, but is my no means conservative - I cut out an editorial cartoon depicting Uncle Sam, his legs being the smoldering ruins of the towers, hoisting up his sleeves and preparing for a fight. Like Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts - again, a liberal who is no fan of this administration - I hung up his column written in the wake of 9/11 which contained this passage:
You see, the steel in us is not always readily apparent. That aspect of our character is seldom understood by people who don't know us well. On this day, the family's bickering is put on hold.
As Americans we will weep, as Americans we will mourn, and as Americans, we will rise in defense of all that we cherish.
So I ask again: What was it you hoped to teach us? It occurs to me that maybe you just wanted us to know the depths of your hatred. If that's the case, consider the message received. And take this message in exchange: You don't know my people. You don't know what we're capable of. You don't know what you just started.
But you're about to learn.
You tell me Karl Rove ... do these sound like the words of someone who desired moderation and counseling for our enemies?
Perhaps that's what I resent most about this administation - that they saw the country come together, they despised it and sought to split it into a million fractious pieces for cheap, political gain. They saw a unified nation, people of all types of political and philosophical persuasions, and worked hard to undermine that unity through divisive actions on the domestic and international fronts.
Karl Rove doesn't know me. He doesn't know the people of New York City either - perhaps the most liberal city on the planet - because if did, he would have thought twice before uttering such a pathetic excuse for propaganda. He doesn't know the millions of liberals - moderate ones and far-left ones - who backed this nation's assault on Al-Qaida. He doesn't know the countless numbers of liberals who make up the ranks of our Armed Forces, and who are dying daily in a conflict we created in Iraq.
Karl Rove doesn't know me ... and he better be pretty damn glad he doesn't.
posted by Jmac at 12:15 PM
2 Comments:
I have grown completely bored with the debate over who says more "mean" or "stupid" things. Dean is a jerk. Blah blah blah. Rove is a jerk. Blah blah blah.
That being the case, I have paid very little attention to the actual defense being offered of Rove by the GOP and the talking heads. So I may be way off here, but...
Isn't it possible to read Rove's statement as an application of "by their fruits you shall know them"? Certainly, everyone was saying all the same "It's on now!" stuff immediately after 9/11. But now we are in the middle of fighting a "war on terror" which (Iraq notwithstanding, just a small detail right?) requires us to actually, you know, get answers from and exercise control over hostile combatants from Afghanistan (most of the Gitmo prisoners are from the scuffling in Afghanistan, not Iraq, aren't they?). But lately all we hear about from the Dems is that Gitmo should be shut down, that we are just like the totalitarians of the first half of the 20th century, etc. So, it appears that a lot has happened since 9/11 unity, and that now many of the people who were grieving then have a very different idea of what it means to "show them what we're made of".
This is not my perspective on Gitmo et al, but it might be Rove's. And if it is, it shows that he wasn't saying that Dems felt the warm fuzzies for terrorists during 9/11 so much as he is saying that apparently they were not the sort of people who knew how to respond to 9/11 in the long run.
That may be a more appropriate defense if it were the one actually being offered by Rove and the GOP, but there has been no allusion to that. Rather, the defense is based on hair-splitting - that Rove was criticizing the response to 9/11 offered by one particular liberal organization, Moveon.org. This is, quite frankly, a pathetic and weak excuse and an attempt to whitewash what Rove said.
One of the more telling quotes in Rove's speech came after he criticized Dick Durbin's comments that Gitmo - with its criticism from both parties, the U.S. public and the international community - was becoming comparable to how other folks viewed the worst regimes in the 20th century. It was a bit grand and overblown on Durbin's part, but it was a specific and needed criticism of our policy regarding Gitmo. The sad thing wasn't that we didn't debate what Durbin, and other critics, said ... but we debated how he said it (shoot the messenger, a strategy this administration loves).
Rove, then, in his speech specifically named Durbin - days after Durbin apologized for the comparison - and said such comments reveal the true motives of Democrats.
There is a distinct difference between making poor choices of words in comparisons - as both Durbin and Rick Santorum have done in recent weeks - and what Rove did. What Rove did was attempt to rewrite history to make his side look 'better,' and he did it at the expense of intentionally and maliciously slandering an entire ideology ... an ideology which counts among its followers thousands of men and women who are currently putting themselves in harm's way in the Middle East.
It's craven, it's ignorant, it's calculated and it's inexcusable. And it's exactly what Rove and his folks have been implying for the past five years ... at least the jackass actually came out and said it, rather than hem-and-haw about it some more.
Post a Comment
<< Home