1 Boring Old Man

The Huffington Post is commenting on Karl Rove’s Chutzpah in making a speech while under indictment. What struck me with both this speech and the one to the New York Conservatives was the distance from any recognizable reality. He spoke as if every policy had succeeded. Democrats are afraid to lower taxes. Republicans aren’t, says he. But he never mentions the fact that the result is a spiralling National Debt. He talks about the war in Iraq as if it is a great success. He describes the ‘insurgents’ as fighting among themselves and on the run.  But the killer is that Democrats are "deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong" on national security. What is he talking about? Clinton focused on Al Qaeda, Bush went on a wild goose chase to Iraq. What in the hell is he talking about? It just goes on and on, and what he says is virtually all a complete fabrication. Unlike the last speech, he says that Democrats aren’t so bad, they’re Republicans’ fellow citizens. Then he reiterates that Democrats shouldn’t exist.

I don’t understand who listens to such speeches and believes any of it is true. Surely they know it’s made up, and stay with Bush for other reasons. The biggest one of all is the part about Democrats being big spenders, which hasn’t been true for decades. It’s in the numbers. I’m beginning to think that taking the Bush, Rove, or Cheney speeches seriously is, itself, a mistake. We ought to just ignore them. They’re fiction – the truth they wish for, not the one we live with.

But more to the point, where is Patrick Fitzgerald? He’s in the position to stop all of this. Rove testified four [?] times, revising his story as he went. In each iteration that we know about, it gets more far fetched. "I didn’t do it." "I did it, but I forgot." "I didn’t use her name." "I found an email." The bottom line for Mr. Rove is really fairly simple, he lies well [and frequently]. In the Plame case, he’s gotten himself in the position of having to answer for his lies.

So indict him already. Put him in a courtroom in front of a jury…

And, speaking of Chutzpah, Larre at Left Coaster has a really good point today. Why is Rove’s speech getting such wide coverage when Al Gore’s speech was virtually ignored in the Press?