"Rove's Brilliant Plan" (Could this be another Rathergate?)

[mtnsnake]

I'm sure this article must've been posted back in February, but reading it today made me wonder if this is in any way relative to what's going on today with the current indictments and apparent Republican gloom and doom, along with our hopes of the above. It makes me wonder if Rovian tactics are setting us up for another Republican "I told you so". Remember Rathergate? It makes me wonder if Rove is setting something up again to make the Democrats look like they were behind a feeble attempt against Republicans that just didn't pan out. I hope not. Here are a few snips of that article that's got me wondering. Notice in the article where Democratic Underground is mentioned:

Wednesday, February 23, 2005
ROVE'S BRILLIANT PLAN

Democrat congressman Maurice Hinchey, speaking on CNN, persists with the idea that Karl Rove devised the fake Rathergate memos:

It doesn’t take an awful lot of imagination if you’re thinking about who it is that might have produced these false documents to try to mislead people in this very cynical way. It would take someone very brilliant, very cynical, very Machiavellian, and it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to come up with the name of Karl Rove as a possibility of having done that.

Is Karl Rove truly that brilliant? Using contemporaneous reports and several eye-witness sources, this site is able to reconstruct the events of last August at Evil Rove Headquarters, located many miles beneath the earth’s surface

(Rove enters the Chamber of Destruction and greets his assembled operatives)

Read the rest of the exchange where the Democratic Underground is mentioned at the end of the article:
http://timblair.net/ee/index.php/weblog/roves_brilliant_plan/

[niceypoo]

1. I've never understood this "Rove is brilliant" BS

All I have ever seen from this whitehouse is incompetence and lies. Rove is "brilliant" at what, temporarily patching a bad situation with lies???

[Marr]

4. Me neither.

The man has a low cunning. That's all.

Being willing to stoop lower than the next guy is not genius.

[Catch22Dem]

6. The man got the retarded son of a shit president elected...

He's got to have SOME skill worth noting.

Please, no offense to the mentally challenged.

[TahitiNut]

11. Scheming unencumbered by a conscience.

No more 'brilliant' than Ted Bundy. :shrug:

[jobycom]

12. Try harder. Know your enemy better. Anyone who knows Rove

(and I don't, for the record, though I know people who do) attest that he is one of the smartest people they know. His problem isn't intelligence, it's conscience. He has none. To him, being able to do something is moral justification for doing it. But his intelligence, both in learning and in ability to strategize, is brilliant.

You've only seen incompetence and lies. Until recently, all most people saw was an honest president beset by lying detractors.

[NEOBuckeye]

19. Rove is only as effective as Americans remain blinded by belief systems.

I saw Bush for who and what he was in the very beginning -- a trojan horse candidate who would appeal to the masses of business and fundamentalist christianity still brainwashed into a stupor by their dogmas and the craven con-artist leaders from whom they will buy anything. Somehow, that instantly rendered Rove's whole bag of tricks ineffective in my eyes.

I saw Bush for who and what he was. Most of us here at DU did as well. Imagine if the rest of America had seen then what we did. Bush would get a footnote in some future history book as an also-ran candidate, and Rove would be a total unknown.

If more Americans were politically awake and aware, a Karl Rove would never have the chance to rise to power. That says much more about the nature of people in this country than it speaks to some supposed "genius" possessed by Rove.

[jobycom]

20. Yes, but...

A lot of people who were fairly informed on politics supported Bush, too, because they believe his ideology is all that matters (I see this attitude with Dems, too, as they support lightweight candidates clearly not ready for the job because of ideology alone.) It doesn't matter. The bottom line is Rove knew his audience and manipulated them well. And that includes Congress-- he knows how to keep the Repub Congresscritters in perfect line, with the proper threats, rewards and punishments. He does the same to the media.

[yurbud]

18. the "poison pill" to neutralize a negative news story

is brilliant, but you can only use it so many times.

That's what Rathergate was. They couldn't directly disprove the substance of the stories about Bush's guard service, so they retype a document pass it to the media, then scream that they are using phony evidence.

A later attempt with the Koran in the toilet story was less successful.

[H2O Man]

2. Nope. Zero chance. n/t

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

3. Memogate maybe. But there's no way they'd engineer a plot that

would involve an actual prosecution and grand jury appearances. Way too dangerous, and no real benefit to them, especially with no election going. It would make no sense whatsoever.

And I would generally believe anything about this crew, but it has to make some kind of sense.

[mtnsnake]

8. Unless Rove screwed up and opened his own can of worms this time

Now THAT would be poetic justice if his own doing-in was done-in by himself.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

9. Well the plot to "out" Plame etc. IS a real plot from Rove. The part

where it got exposed and investigated he didn't exactly plan on, I think.

[mtnsnake]

10. There ya go. If that's the case it proves Rove is more evil than brilliant

He might have outsmarted his own self this time. Gone too far for his own LACK of brilliance.

[jobycom]

14. That's it

Plame was the plot, this is him getting caught. Criminal genuises get caught sometimes.

That's not to say that Rove isn't handling the PR on this, plotting ways to make everything look better for him. He may even be behind all the stories of how bad it will all be, so that when the actual findings are revealed they seem to be a letdown, and he can blame the liberal media for over-reacting. He could also have a plant or too before the grand juries and investigation to try to get out of this. If he has something on a key witness, for instance, he can spring it just after the indictments to discredit the witness, and maybe have the charges dropped. That would be like him, to sabotage a witness in order to sabotage the investigation.

It's also possible he's beaten. If he sabotages the investigation and gets caught, he will be in worse trouble, so maybe he'll decide to lay low and let it happen. It's a different game trying to tamper with a federal prosecutor. Dan Rather didn't have subpoena power, nor the ability to threaten everyone else with jail time for NOT spilling the beans.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

15. Yes, the difference here is that public opinion doesn't decide whether

you are indicted or convicted. It may influence the political consequences of those outcomes but it can't change what a judge or jury does.

[mtnsnake]

17. Hopefully this is all his own undoing...an evil plan that simple went awry

A plan by Rove to divulge Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA operative (to punish her husband, Joe Wilson, for his criticism), and Rove ends up being the one outted for his efforts. Ahhh, nice...

[niallmac]

5. Hmm. Nope. Don't think so.

It's hard to be machiavellian when you are in your fourth grand jury appearance wondering what everyone else said and what exactly does Fitz know and...

"...do I tell the truth and hang myself for perhaps no reason or lie and go to jail for perjury?"

I lull myself to sleep every night by going over that scenario. Piggy Boy with his undies in a knot.

[countingbluecars]

7. "Are conservatives being criminalized?"

That was a discussion topic this morning on C-span. I think indictments are coming and the spin has begun. The poor, poor conservatives are being victimized by the bad liberals.

[FreedomAngel82]

13. If you haven't you should read

the Greg Palast review of what happened. Notice how they never tried to prove Bush was involved and didn't go AWOL. They just simply made the claim that the memo's were forged and fake. He basically says because they couldn't control CBS until they got rid of the people involved.

[PurityOfEssence]

16. Those documents still haven't been shown to be fakes

This is yet another example of chorusing an opinion over and over until it's taken as truth. Because the documents CBS had were photocopies, they couldn't prove the authenticity.

Here are a few points: the typesetting, font and spacing are all consistent with typewriters that were present at the base at that time. Killian's secretary said that there were memos similar to these that she'd typed, but these aren't the ones. She also corroborates Killian's disgust with Junior and Killian's desire to cover his own ass. At least one of them has a bit of faulty formatting, and they are all quite short. This is all consistent with a non-typist (Killian himself) typing these to have backup beyond the official memos his secretary had typed. (Since all of those other memos were "cleansed" during Junior's tenure as Governor, I'd say he knew what he was doing.) The signatures are consistent with others of his.

The only quibbling I've heard of yet that points to them being forgeries is that some terminology sounded more like Army-speak than Air Force terminology, but I'm not aware enough of the differences to know. That's the ONLY evidence that suggests forgery.

There is still one test that could help to determine authenticity: check out the physical paper and toner on the photocopies and compare them to types used where the person who allegedly copied the originals would have been at the time of copying them. This could go a long way to shedding some light on all this; toner has been evolving ever since photocopying started, and paper formulations vary a bit, too.

Instinct tells me that these are photocopies of genuine originals, but I'm definitely a biased liberal. Regardless, the fear and viciousness these stirred up are all a bit fishy. The tiresome lies of these being fakes are just more proof of the right's unscrupulousness. Until proven fakes, they're "questionable" or something of the sort. To scream over and over that they're fakes has gotten it into peoples' heads that they are. It simply isn't true.

CBS withdrew its contention of authenticity when it couldn't prove it. Others need to withdraw their contention of fakery because they haven proven THAT. This isn't the Soviet Union; the burden of proof is on the accuser, not the accused. When CBS was the accuser, it honorably withdrew the accusation when it couldn't--or wouldn't--produce proof. Now the reactionaries are the accusers, and since they can't prove their contention of forgery, they should withdraw their charges. The media just lets it go, and somehow it's a given that they're fakes when there's no evidence that they are.

This is masterful manipulation, and until we learn to counter the endlessly shouted lie technique, we're just going to remain subjugated to these monarchic thugs.

As for "Rove's Brilliant Plan", I don't think this was anything of the kind. He probably had a hand in taking something that was hugely embarrassing and casting doubt on it and shouting it down. True to form, it was also used to get rid of Rather and spook Sumner Redstone. People have elevated Rove's tactics to breathtaking genius level, and I think that's just plain silly.