Karl, Go Say Something Dumb (Klein / WP)

[struggle4progress]

<snip> I will give Rove the benefit of the doubt and assume his words had some kind of broader, less ridiculous context. Rove knows as well as anyone that liberals are not firing IEDs at our soldiers. He also is enough of a student of history to know that any attempt to muzzle your political opponents for national security reasons (the comfort-to-the-enemy argument) is the first step toward ... wait, let me think of a moderate term that won't get me in trouble like Durbin...okay, toward Stalinism.

My guess is that, as part of some double-secret triple-backloop political strategy, Rove realized he needed to cause a distraction. He informed the president that the poll numbers were looking bad, or that Social Security privatization is about as likely as the resurgence of alchemy. The president said, "Karl, go out there and say something really dumb." By now you should know that nothing happens in the White House political shop except for very calculated reasons. Rove is a red herring. Keep your eye on the big fish.

http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/achenblog/2005/06/stalinist_repub.html

[Cha]

1. And they must think we're all as

stupid as shite or as dumb as they are.

"The LA Times basically called cheney a LIAR today"..

"Vice President Dick Cheney has never been one to let reality get in the way of his message. With his credibility already strained after it turned out that none of his pre-war assertions about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction were true, he is nonetheless still deluded by wishful thinking. A case in point: his recent assertion that increased violence in Iraq indicates the insurgency there is in its "last throes, if you will."

No, we won't, and neither, as it turns out, will the Army's top brass. Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Persian Gulf, essentially said that was nonsense while testifying to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday. "I believe there are more foreign fighters coming into Iraq than there were six months ago," he said, adding that the strength of the insurgency is "about the same" as it was six months ago."

More at..
http://www.hoffmania.com/blog/2005/06/its_official_th.html