Monday, January 23, 2006

GOP will sink to new lows in 2006

Everyone already knew this, but Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman made it official before a Republican National Committee gathering on Friday: The GOP will rely on the lowest-brow common denominator of demagogic appeal as its campaign strategy in 2006.

As the Washington Post synopsized their thinking, “They see national security … at the heart of the GOP appeal to voters.”

If you can say “chutzpah,” then you’re a qualified Republican strategist. For the strategy is nothing else. Here’s a guy – Rove – who is under federal investigation for betraying national security lecturing his party on the supremacy of national security as a political issue.

And, naturally, since we’re talking chutzpah, the chutzpah doesn’t stop there.

They defended Bush’s use of warrant-less eavesdropping to gather intelligence about possible terrorist plots. “Do Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean really think that when the NSA is listening in on terrorists planning attacks on America, they need to hang up when those terrorists dial their sleeper cells in the United States?” Mehlman asked.

Not a single Democrat or other critic of the Bush administration’s illegal surveillance has suggested that the government should cripple its intelligence-gathering efforts. Not one. Critics simply prefer – demand – that these efforts be conducted under the law. So Rove and Mehlman and their GOP candidates will be stumping for the next ten months about an issue that never was, and isn’t now.

Suppose Karl Rove, Esq., were defending a man accused of stealing a loaf of bread. No doubt his defense before the jury would be, “Would you deny this man the opportunity to feed his family?” The prosecutor might – and obviously would – counter that no one has a problem with the man feeding his family, but he should have gone about it in a legal way: gotten a job, hence a paycheck with which to pay for the bread.

But Rove is hoping for another Simpson jury to personify the American electorate in 2006. The chutzpah has worked wonders with mass gullibility so many times.

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If it works this time, America will be just an old memory; done, finished...

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