Once again, Karl Rove is kicking the Democrats’ ass. This happens with disturbing regularity, and even though I’m an Independent, I can’t stand it. So how is that the Democrats themselves are fine with the ass-kicking?
“Tell me where I should stand, Mr. Rove, so you can have the best shot at me. Do you want me to look weak, indecisive, or unfocused? If you want all three, no problem. We Democrats have been working hard at honing our political incompetence ever since Clinton left office.”
It sickens me to watch the Democrats lie down in the middle of the road and let the Rove Machine crush them. Then they stay put and Rove turns around to ride over them again. I’d blame this annoyingly repetitive crushing for their lack of backbone, but the sad truth is that Democratic spinelessness is almost entirely their own doing.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd says it a lot better than I can. In the continuation to this post you’ll find “Delusion and Illusion Worthy of Dickens” and “Looking for a Democratic Tough Guy or Girl.” She hits the Dems right where it hurts: on the truth-bone.
Some excerpts follow. Read them and weep (if you’re a progressive). Then read the entire columns and get angry. At Rove and the neo-cons. And also, at the Democrats who allow the party to flounder along without the guidance of their own Karl Rove.
I can’t believe that there isn’t some ruthless political genius out there who the Dems can hire to be the anti-Rove, a countervailing force with not only equal but superior savvy. Until you find him, Howard Dean, and pay him or her whatever exorbitant salary it takes to get this wunderkind on board, I’ll continue to ignore your frequent email messages asking me to sign an online petition.
Karl Rove kicks ass. He doesn’t circulate petitions. Observe and learn, Democrats. Here’s some of what Dowd has to say in her two columns:
The [Democratic] party simply seems incapable of getting the muscular message and riveting messenger needed to dispel the mud, fog, drizzle and soot emanating from Karl Rove's rag-and-bone shop on Pennsylvania Avenue.The Dems need to drum up a decent message so they look as if they know what the Dickens they're doing before the November election. Otherwise, they'll look like bowed supplicants holding out gruel cups to Karl Rove and pleading, "Please, sir, I want some more."
To lead, and not just conduct campaigns that parrot the liberal elite's editorial pages, you have to shape your own identity and political destiny. And ever since the 2000 race, the Democrats have let Republicans caricature them as effeminate. The Democrats have let the G.O.P. give them their shape, and it's an hourglass.
If the Democrats are like the dithering ''Desperate Housewives,'' the Republicans have come across like the counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer on ''24'': fast with a gun, loose with the law, willing to torture in the name of protecting the nation. Except Jack Bauer is competent.
[1/26 update: Courtesy of Liberal Oasis, here's a good example of Democratic spinelessness--the Alito nomination.]
January 25, 2006
Delusion and Illusion Worthy of Dickens
By Maureen Dowd
The Democrats will never win the White House as long as they're stuck in Bleak House. They're slipping and sliding in the same crust-upon-crust of mud and caboose-creeping fog and soft black drizzle and flakes of soot that blacken the chamber of law in the opening of the terrific Dickens novel (now an irresistible PBS series).
The lumbering pace of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce will pale compared with the time it will take the cowed and colicky Democrats to yank back power from Republicans skilled at abusing it.
The party simply seems incapable of getting the muscular message and riveting messenger needed to dispel the mud, fog, drizzle and soot emanating from Karl Rove's rag-and-bone shop on Pennsylvania Avenue.
As the White House drives its truckload of lies around the country, it becomes ever clearer that Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Al Gore are just not the right people to respond to the administration's national security scare-a-thon.
We got mired in Iraq in the first place partly because Dick Cheney and Rummy thought that, post-Vietnam and post-Clinton, America was seen as soft. One shock-and-awe session, one tyrant stomped on, they reckoned, and the Arab world would no longer see Americans as wimps. That reasoning turned out to be dangerous, flying in the face of warnings from our own intelligence experts.
But Karl Rove is still dishing out the same line, and it's still working: those who want to re-evaluate the strategy in Iraq are soft. Those who want to rein in the Patriot Act are soft. Those who question the Alito doctrine of presidential absolutism are soft. Those who don't want to break the law and snoop on Americans are soft - not just soft, but practically collaborating with the terrorists.
"Republicans have a post-9/11 worldview" on national security, Mr. Rove said last week, "and many Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview. That doesn't make them unpatriotic, not at all. But it does make them wrong - deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong."
But you only need to check the paper daily to see that this administration has been deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong on everything: from the promise to rebuild Iraq and the consequences of deploying a strained Army this long in an insurgent war to the failure to respond to the aftermath of Katrina, after dissembling about pre-storm alarms.
The bumbling Bush team that ignored the warning "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" also ignored one that went something like: "Katrina Determined to Attack New Orleans." And now the White House is trying to inhibit Congressional questions on Katrina, just as it did for the 9/11 inquiries.
The administration's p.r. offensive on warrantless - and questionably effective - snooping is so aggressive that it has even risked exposing the president to an occasional unscripted, but still not tough, question. So he rambles on about steering clear of "Brokeback Mountain" and the therapeutic value of mountain biking. And he calls Barney, the Scottish terrier, "the son I never had." (Barney's dad is all bark and no bite.)
The White House is as skittish about bilked Indians as it is about billing-and-cooing cowboys. It admits it has pictures of the president with Jack Abramoff, but won't cough them up.
While he was out defending his scofflaw behavior, W. had to address the fact that the real nuclear threat (Iran), as opposed to the fake nuclear threat (Iraq), is embarrassing him. He told the Iranian people: "We have no beef with you." (State Department reporters puzzled over how that might be translated into Farsi: "We have no cow with you"?)
You couldn't turn on a TV this week without seeing Torture Guy Alberto Gonzales give all-purpose legal cover to Dick Cheney as that Grim Peeper ravages the Constitution. At a Georgetown University speech, W.'s legal lickspittle ignored a few student protesters, but he might have learned something from their banner, emblazoned with words of Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither."
In their usual twisted way, the Bushies are reducing their abuse of the law to a test of testosterone - knowing that the Democrats will play Judy to their Punch.
The Dems need to drum up a decent message so they look as if they know what the Dickens they're doing before the November election. Otherwise, they'll look like bowed supplicants holding out gruel cups to Karl Rove and pleading, "Please, sir, I want some more."
----------------------------------------------------
January 18, 2006
Looking for a Democratic Tough Guy or Girl
By Maureen Dowd
The Democrats were throwing haymakers at the White House this week, but they will never succeed as long as they're perceived as the party in skirts.
Al Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton called the Bush administration on its apparently bottomless store of imperial sins. They made a lot of good points. They just didn't score any.
This trio, apparently jockeying for '08, are not the best messengers. They're loaded down with baggage.
Two of them, who could have stopped W. and Dick Cheney before they undid 230 years of American democracy, didn't, because they allowed themselves to be painted as girlie men. The other, a manly girl, has been so cautious and opportunistic about weighing in on everything from Schiavo to Alito and Iraq that when she finally sang out on Monday and railed against W., she sounded more soprano than basso profundo.
It was easy for the Republicans to play their usual gender games and dismiss the three Democrats as whiny, shrill and ineffectual.
After Mr. Gore and Senator Clinton went on the attack, Scott McClellan rebutted: ''I think we know one tends to like or enjoy grabbing headlines. The other one -- sounds like that the political season may be starting early.'' He rubbed Mr. Gore's nose in the fact that he is not the president fighting the terrorists, noting: ''If he wants to be the voice for Democrats on this debate over national security, we welcome it.''
To lead, and not just conduct campaigns that parrot the liberal elite's editorial pages, you have to shape your own identity and political destiny. And ever since the 2000 race, the Democrats have let Republicans caricature them as effeminate. The Democrats have let the G.O.P. give them their shape, and it's an hourglass.
There are moments in campaigns and policy debates when it's possible to knock the sword out of your opponent's hand. Al Gore and John Kerry whiffed. Mr. Kerry and Senator Clinton held the president's coat as he rushed to war.
This all allowed the Bushies to use 9/11 as a shield and a bludgeon. They made their own rules and cast themselves as renegade heroes.
If the Democrats are like the dithering ''Desperate Housewives,'' the Republicans have come across like the counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer on ''24'': fast with a gun, loose with the law, willing to torture in the name of protecting the nation. Except Jack Bauer is competent.
The Democrats' chronic impotence led to the Republicans' reign of incompetence.
U.S. News & World Report features a menacing Dick Cheney -- looking like a man who just swallowed a country -- on the cover this week, with the headline ''Tough Guy.''
The story recounts how Mr. Cheney, as Bush I's defense secretary, derided lawmakers as ''a bunch of annoying gnats.'' Maybe that's why he doesn't feel the need to pay attention to those silly little laws they make.
How many things do you have to mess up in the country and the world before you lose your reputation for machismo?
Al Gore, belatedly perhaps, made an uncharacteristically bold move. He made the completely valid point that ''the president of the United States has been breaking the law, repeatedly and insistently.''
''To eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant, imprison American citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can't he do?'' he told an audience on Monday, denouncing Bush's power grab. He warned Republicans that they should be wary of setting these extralegal precedents because someday a leader with values abhorrent to them could put all that power to use.
Mr. Cheney, lumbering around in unreality, continues to be unapologetic as the chorus of Democratic complaints gets louder. Above the law is exactly where he wants to be. Even when he can easily -- and retroactively -- get snooping warrants, he doesn't want their stinking warrants. Warrants are for sissies.
''When we get all through 10 years from now,'' he told U.S. News, ''we'll look back on this period of time and see that liberating 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq really did represent a major, fundamental shift, obviously, in U.S. policy in terms of how we dealt with the emerging terrorist threat -- and that we'll also have fundamentally changed circumstances in that part of the world.''
Yeah. But not necessarily for the better. Whatever else you can say about the Bush crowd, they stick to their guns, even when they can't shoot straight.
Agreed. Fire the consultants. Well, most of 'em anyway.
http://www.politicsandtechnology.com/2005/01/sick_and_tired_.html
Posted by: Kari Chisholm | January 26, 2006 at 09:32 AM