Bill Moyers: The Rove Legacy

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/17/3230/

The Rove Legacy
by Bill Moyers

What struck me about my fellow Texan, Karl Rove, is that he knew how to win elections as if they were divine interventions. You may think God summoned Billy Graham to Florida on the eve of the 2000 election to endorse George W. Bush just in the nick of time, but if it did happen that way, the good lord was speaking in a Texas accent.

Karl Rove figured out a long time ago that the way to take an intellectually incurious draft-averse naughty playboy in a flight jacket with chewing tobacco in his back pocket and make him governor of Texas, was to sell him as God’s anointed in a state where preachers and televangelists outnumber even oil derricks and jack rabbits. Using church pews as precincts Rove turned religion into a weapon of political combat — a battering ram, aimed at the devil’s minions, especially at gay people.

It’s so easy, as Karl knew, to scapegoat people you outnumber, and if God is love, as rumor has it, Rove knew that, in politics, you better bet on fear and loathing. Never mind that in stroking the basest bigotry of true believers you coarsen both politics and religion.

At the same time he was recruiting an army of the lord for the born-again Bush, Rove was also shaking down corporations for campaign cash. Crony capitalism became a biblical injunction. Greed and God won four elections in a row - twice in the lone star state and twice again in the nation at large. But the result has been to leave Texas under the thumb of big money with huge holes ripped in its social contract, and the U.S. government in shambles - paralyzed, polarized, and mired in war, debt and corruption.

Rove himself is deeply enmeshed in some of the scandals being investigated as we speak, including those missing emails that could tell us who turned the attorney general of the United States into a partisan sockpuppet. Rove is riding out of Dodge city as the posse rides in. At his press conference this week he asked God to bless the president and the country, even as reports were circulating that he himself had confessed to friends his own agnosticism; he wished he could believe, but he cannot. That kind of intellectual honesty is to be admired, but you have to wonder how all those folks on the Christian right must feel discovering they were used for partisan reasons by a skeptic, a secular manipulator. On his last play of the game all Karl Rove had to offer them was a hail mary pass, while telling himself there’s no one there to catch it.

[daninthemoon]

1. This is the first I've heard of rove's lack of faith, but I always

questioned how he and his ilk could so callously manipulate the faith of true believers for their own gain if they truly believed themselves. Once again, the televangelist,megachurch,holier than thou "leader" is exposed. Will any of the duped notice? I doubt it.

[Uncle Joe]

2. I still believe Rove couldn't sell ice cold lemonade to the denizens of Hell.

The corporate media packaged and sold Bush while trashing and slandering Al Gore precisely because Gore was the primary champion of the Internet, and it's the Internet they hate. As the Internet grew in power, the leaders of the corporate media recognized the threat to their monopoly on information, power, money and influence. It's like they say, "no good deed goes unpunished", and this was their way of punishing Al Gore for empowering the American People.

Without the corporate media's two year "War Against Gore" waged for the sole purpose of keeping the race close enough for Bush to steal if not outright give Bush a victory, Rove, Nader, Katherine Harris, the Butterfly Ballot, the purging of likely Democratic voters in Florida and the Supreme Court's interference either wouldn't have come in to play or would not have affected a national Al Gore land slide victory. The first and worst deception against the American People was committed by the corporate media.

Moyers re ran an excellent program, just last week about the corporate media's selling of the Iraq War through lies and deception and just flat out not doing their job by investigating and reporting the truth, they would go on to brain wash up to 70+% of the American People in to believing Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. Not all of the corporate media was complicit, Kidder Ridder was an exception to this rule and of course they were never invited on the Sunday Morning talk shows to refute the B.S. being hoisted on the American People. But this is the kind of power and influence, the corporate media feared and fears losing. I just hope one day, Moyers will do a special on the corporate media's selling of Bush and the slandering of Gore prior to the selection of 2000, because this was the predecessor and natural lead up to the selling of the war.