Karl Rove's insurgency

(Cole Slaw power, activate! I hope Flop doesn't mind that I commandeer the top of his post, but if you live in NYC, you have no excuse to not contact Bloomberg and call on him to condemn this outrage in the strongest terms possible. If he won't resign from the GOP, he should at least stand up for his city. It will affect the likelihood of me voting for him, and it should for you, too. Contact info here. -CrimeNotes)

My co-blogger has covered the (quite proper) indignation and outrage to the recent remarks of Karl Rove. But I've been doing a lot of reading, and even a little thinking about his comments, which, while inflammatory, clearly had a deeper purpose.

I mean don't get me wrong, Karl Rove certainly may go fuck himself. I'm one of those liberals, and I probably don't need to tell you that my first impulse when terroists attacked my city was not to get Dr. Frasier Crane on the horn. Far from it. In fact, I'd like to note that while the president was running to Louisiana and Nebraska, I was here in New York, hoping my friends weren't dead.

But forget about that for now. This is classic Rove. I think that he's hoping that by throwing some red meat to the base he can prevent some defections on the war. Republicans are starting to come around on the Iraq issue, but if there's one thing that will keep them from peeling away, it's some more good, old-fashioned demonization of liberals. Even some perfectly reasonable (and dare I say, liberal) friends shy away from the term. To my way of thinking* Rove is basically reminding Republicans how cool kids do and do not think. It's straight out of the kickball diamond.

In a similar vein, I wonder if Rove and Bush like asking Bill Frist if he's got plans to go to the screening of Gaylord, Say No on the mall next week?

But I digress. Now that it's Rove saying this and not one of his puppets is intriguing. It reminds me of that turning-point scene in so many movies when the bad guy leaves his underground lair to do what his incompetent subordinates couldn't. This is Darth Vader cranking up his TIE-fighter or Dr. Evil capturing his own sharks and mounting laser beams on them himself.

It's also possible that he's doing it because now that Sen. Durbin has been appropriately cowed he can just reply that Democrats sure weren't outraged when Durbin said something similar. Of course, it's not like that at all. But Rove, in his genius, knows that reporters on deadline don't have the time for extensive critical thinking, and therefore will swallow the false equivalency without question. It's classic hornswoggling, and I'm sick of watching professional journalists fall for it.

* I should note, that much of my thinking on Rove's motives here is informed by my reading of this post, by Billmon at This Modern World. I'm going to go so far as to call that required reading for anyone still interested or incensed by this.