Red Meat

Tankwoman has already hit this topic pretty hard, but once is not enough.

With the president's poll numbers sinking into oblivion, it was time for Karl "Bush's Brain" Rove to run the wedge play, to serve some red meat to the party faithful. Wednesday night, at a fundraiser for the Conservative Party of New York, not far from Ground Zero, Rove served the meat raw...

Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers. I don't know about you, but moderation and restraint is not what I felt when I watched the twin towers crumble to the ground, a side of the Pentagon destroyed, and almost 3,000 of our fellow citizens perish in flames and rubble.

Not content to stop there, Rove managed to work Dick Durbin into his remarks, all for the sake of getting in another jab at liberals...

Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year? Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.

I'm not sure where Rove gets the part about "therapy and understanding for the attackers." Maybe it was the desire of some of us to try to understand the motivations of the attackers, to try to figure out why they hated America enough to fly planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, to try to get more meaning out of this horrific attack than the obtuse "they hate us for our freedoms."

Rove was right about the indictments though. This was a heinous crime and a very small minority of us thought that the United States should work with other countries to bring the perpetrators to justice. That certainly made more sense, I thought, than bombing innocent Afghanis. Boston Globe columnist James Carroll laid out what I thought was a very persuasive case for "Law Not War" just days after 9/11. But, of course, blood was in the water and the very small minority was ignored in the rush to war. The Senate unanimously approved of going to war; there was only one dissenter in the House. And how is that working out for you, Karl? Where's Osama? How's that reconstruction of Afghanistan going? Remember Afghanistan?

The rest of that though is just pure Rove bullshit, working that wedge, tossing out the red meat. Nobody felt "moderation and restraint." Everyone was scared to death, wondering what was coming next. I think everyone (certainly everyone I saw over the next few days, myself included) felt like we had been kicked in the stomach. There was dread, anger, hatred, a myriad of emotions, none of them pleasant. There certainly were no calls for peace, love and harmony. We all wanted to see Osama brought in "dead or alive." And whatever happened to that? Now they say they know where he is but we've got to work with the Pakistanis. Whatever happened to the Bush Doctrine of going after the countries that harbor the terrorists? Doesn't apply to Pakistan, I guess.

And, of course, Dick Durbin won't ever be able to apologize enough for what he didn't say to satisfy BushCo. But I guess talking about the torture, bringing the torture out into the light of day, condemning the torture is a whole lot worse than the torture itself. Dick Durbin's remarks about the torture surely have put our troops in a lot more danger than those harmless "fraternity pranks" at Abu Gharib and Guantanamo and all the other fun spots where it's nothing but lemon chicken and a little trouble adjusting to air conditioning. It's all just a part of the "motives of liberals," our great desire to put the troops in danger.

This was all well orchestrated by Rove. He looked at the polls (that terrorism number is the only one that's above 50% approval), and he's got the TV pundits having the conversation he wanted them to have today: that when you come right down to it, those bellicose conservatives are really the only ones you can trust for national security. Certainly can't trust those wishy-washy liberals. All they wanted to do was bring bin Laden to justice.

Democrats and the liberal blogosphere are screaming for Rove's resignation, but they might as well save their breath. The White House is standing behind him. The Grand Old Party is standing behind him. He's not going to resign. And if, by some miracle, he does resign, Bush won't accept his resignation. Hell, a screw-up like Rumsfeld has resigned twice already and the president has refused to accept it. The head of the National Security Council, who couldn't see the threat in a memo entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" got a promotion. They gave George Tenet and Paul Bremer medals. Resign? They might get a lukewarm "I'm sorry if someone was offended by what I said" apology, but I have my doubts about that. Where are all those moderate Republicans we keep hearing about? Is there a single Republican that will criticize Rove for his remarks? I doubt it.

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