1 Boring Old Man

Karl Rove made a speech last week to the Republican National Committee which laid out three platforms for the upcoming midterm elections:

National Security: Iraq is making great strides towards Democracy. We’re winning the Iraq War and in the War on Terror. Pulling out of Iraq now would be abandoning the Iraqis, handing them over to the Terrorists, and strengthen the Terrorist Movement. We need to renew the Patriot Act and embrace the necessity of unwarranted domestic surveillance.

In Rove’s speech, the Iraqi War is equated with the War on Terror, something the whole world knows that is not true. There was no association between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. There were no Weapons of Mass Destruction. We are neither winning the War on Terror nor are we winning in Iraq. The truth is that we are treading water in a country we destabilized, creating a fertile ground for Terrorists. And we validated their contention that we are imperialists in the Middle East. Karl Rove ignores that we are fighting an unjust war that the Administration lied to get us into and he ignores the reality of what’s happening there.

The Patriot Act as it was enacted gave the Administration wartime power that was never intended to become permanent, and needs to be revised. In talking about the N.S.A. domestic surveillance, he speaks as if what bothers us is the surveillance itself and ignores the obvious fact that what bothers us is the "warrantless" surveillance. The Administration has mounted no sensible argument for ignoring the F.I.S.A. court. He distorts the objections beyond recognition, then implies that the critics are anti-National Security. That is untrue at a fundamental level and the Administration knows it.

The Economy: After talking about curbing inflation and falling unemployment, he talks about cutting back government spending, tax cuts, and the rise in the DOW Jones Average. The latter is typical Rovian technique, "Since the start of 2003, the DOW is up more than 25 percent…"

The Dow Jones Average does not say what he implies. If anything, it has struggled to remain very flat since Bush was elected. It’s up from 2003 because it plummeted in 2002:

If there’s some dramatic change in inflation, the Bureau of Labor hasn’t included it in the Consumer Price Index figures. It looks like a straight line to me:

As for unemployment, what is he talking about? It barely looks like we might be recovering from the rise in unemployment that’s occurred since Bush was elected [again from the Bureau of Labor]:

But the biggest lie of all has to do with the tax cuts. How have they done that? It’s certainly not by cutting government spending. They’ve done it by ignoring the National Debt [just like Reagan and his father did]:

And as for government spending, well it’s gone up faster and the income has gone down [duh, lower taxes]:

So what is he talking about? These graphs are all from public government sites. The truth is actually out there for anyone to see in print. Nothing he says is true, that’s all…

The Courts: He then talked about Roberts and Alito and slammed the Democrats for maligning these fine Constitutionalists. 

There’s nothing to say. We all know it doesn’t have anything to do with fine Constitutionalists. It has to do with Roe vs Wade. It’s his only point that has anything like truth attached to it. They got the Christian Right’s abortion agenda into the Supreme Court. I’ve got nothing to add about the courts. 

My point is a simple one. It’s more than run of the mill political exageration, it’s outright lying. And Rove is their premier liar. The Democrats are spinning their wheels unless they can make it extremely clear, painfully clear, that the Republicans are pure-D smoke and mirrors – that what they bring to the table is incompetence, an unamerican foreign policy agenda [the Bush Doctrine], a lack of integrity, and a level of corruption unparalleled in our lifetime.

They’re running on fumes. Anybody got a match?