A Bridge Too Far Towards Nowhere

(CNN) -- Former Bush adviser Karl Rove said Sunday that Sen. John McCain had gone "one step too far" in some of his recent ads attacking Sen. Barack Obama.

"In case anyone was still wondering whether John McCain is running the sleaziest, most dishonest campaign in history, today Karl Rove -- the man who held the previous record -- said McCain's ads have gone too far," said campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor, in a statement sent to reporters minutes after Rove's on-air comments.

If there's anything we've learned about conservatives, their eventual downfall is that they never know -- before the fact -- when to draw the line; whether it's if the country has gone far enough to the right, how much less regulation of financial institutions is too little, how many lies to tell about a political opponent, or how unqualified for office a running mate can be, there's not the perspective to know when they are about to overreach, so the good news is that, inevitably, they do.

It's just that waiting for the inevitable can be excruciatingly painful.

Dirty Mind

Old fool David Broder adopts an almost defiant tone in a column today on his BFF Karl Rove's resignation. He seems to fancy the world class dirty trickster as, in the immortal words of Prince, "such a hunk, so full of spunk..." (you'll have to Google the rest of the verse.)

There is little in the column of the High Broderism we've come to expect from the man himself. Broder does acknowledge Rove's "contributions to the divisiveness of American politics." But then we get a thought like this:

It is hard to generate much sympathy for someone as unrepentant as Rove, someone who at most acknowledges that his party is "a little bit behind the curve" when it comes to the voters.

Rove is slightly unsympathetic to Broder not because of his many misdeeds, not for his nearly complete lack of ethics or his enormous catalog of unfairnesses, but because he's unrepentant! Unrepentent for hurting the G.O.P.!

It gets worse, much worse. Broder seems to be on the right track in defining "Rovism" as just the latest chapter in "the domination of America by a certain type of Republicanism":

Even before his partnership with Bush began back in Austin, Rove had drunk deeply of the magic potion dispensed by Lee Atwater, the South Carolina whiz who had absorbed the anger and frustration of the white Southern blue-collar families with whom he was raised. Atwater was Rove's first boss at the Republican National Committee, and my first conversations with Rove were dominated by his encyclopedic knowledge of the shifting political allegiance of Dixie precincts as their residents reacted to the civil rights revolution and the changed positions of the national parties by migrating from Democrats to Dixiecrats and Wallace-ites to Republicans.

But as you can see in his sanitized version of this history, Rove Broder isn't interested in reality. (Nor is he interested in exploring the valuable point Matthew Yglesias recently made about how the political realignment Broder writes of here is the very dynamic behind the partisan politics he normally decries.)

No, Broder's only point in the passage above is to show Rove as a mere passive observer of the ripening of Nixon's Southern Strategy. Rove just happened to be in the right place at the right time to observe Southern voters who favored an apartheid society "migrating [in] political allegiance" from Democratic to Republican. Broder's Rove is a kind of a bookkeeper, almost, a clerk, a simple "direct-mail specialist" building "an institutional advantage for the entire GOP."

But Atwater and Rove didn't build an institution so much as borrow one -- and that'd be the institution of slavery. And Broderella will never tell you that.

Through a Glass Darkly

On the TV in The Corner:

Meanwhile, on Fox ... [Andy McCarthy]

Karl Rove really comes across as smart and likeable ... perhaps because he is smart and likeable.

08/19 10:35 AM

Meanwhile, on NBC's "Meet the Press" (and on Earth generally) ...

Karl Rove really comes across as a smug, lying, morally bankrupt fatcat seething with vengeful partisan anger ... perhaps because he is a smug, lying, morally bankrupt fatcat seething with vengeful partisan anger.

Kvatch's Kocktail Hour - Machiavelli's Mojito

It's Friday and time once again for Kvatch's Kocktail Hour. This afternoon we honor Karl Rove with a drink created by the great man himself:

Machiavelli's Mojito

- 2 oz lime juice
- 2 oz rum
- 2 oz club soda
- Hemlock leaves, crushed

Popular at White House parties honoring the Democratic congressional leadership.

Check out Rove on the Rocks at Blognonymous and The Enduring Majority at The Unruly Mob.

Pounding on Democrats, with Pinky Extended

Rush Limbaugh interviewed Karl Rove yesterday. Mostly it's what you'd expect (Karl and Rush agree that Bush is wonderful and Republicans are right about everything all the time), but this seems rather forced:

RUSH: Something I've always wanted to ask you and I just never have. Could you tell us what it was like in the first months of the administration, following the aftermath in Florida? You had made the strategic decision to adopt a new tone. You wanted to try to build bridges back to Democrats after the divisive nineties. The president had done it in Texas with Democrats, and you consulted them on legislation. Do you have any regrets about that approach?

Show of hands: Who here thinks this is something Rush has "always wanted to ask" Rove?

Of course it's nothing more than a setup, so Rove can talk about how nice Bush was -- and is:

KARL ROVE: No. Look, when we were able to find willing allies who are willing to work across party lines, it was the right thing to do.... [President Bush is] not going to engage in the kind of personal name-calling that makes Washington... Look, there ought to be politics in politics. But after the elections are over, people ought to be able to put things aside and look at things with the best interests of the country at heart, and if they don't agree, they don't agree, but if they ought to agree and should agree, they ought to try and move something forward....

...and on and on in that vein. And that's a setup for the real point of the interview, which follows immediately: an extended (and I'm sure highly enjoyable) round of Hillary-bashing.

KARL ROVE: ...You know, this is a woman who has been less than supportive of the policies that those men and women who are in the frontlines of the global war on terror fighting. This is like a woman who has opposed the Patriot Act that gave us the tools to defend the homeland. This is a woman who opposes the terrorist surveillance program that allowed us to listen in on the conversations of bad people who are calling into the United States. She opposed the FISA reforms that would allow us to listen into communications and see the communications of international terrorists who are communicating with other international terrorists, even outside the country whose messages simply happened to flow through US telecom networks. You know, again, I'm a little bit surprised that somebody with a record so weak on these things would somehow deign to lecture this president, who is very popular among the military and military families because they see him as a strong commander-in-chief who supports them, loves them, and gives them everything they need and want.

They just won't be honest and get straight to the point: "We hate these people. Here comes the bashing!" They have to pretend that they're the nice guys and we're the ogres. They can't bash without piously denouncing bashing first. They're like preachers at a whorehouse who tell the hookers that they're depraved demon-driven harlots before screwing them.

The base falls for this. Present-day Republicans will all go to their graves thinking not that Bush was stupid and vicious and hell-bent on vanquishing his enemies, but that he was the soul of kindness and it just so happened that everyone who supported him bashed Democrats at every opportunity, coarsening our political dialogue and making compromise impossible -- Bush had nothing to do with it.

*****

By the way, in the course of the interview with Rush, Rove talks about his big book-reading contest with Bush -- which, for the moment, I'm going to discuss as if everything I've read about it is actually true:

KARL ROVE: I beat him last year, 110 to 94, and I'm ahead this year.

Well, bully for you, Karl -- and that was quite a comeback, because U.S. News reported at this time last year that Bush was ahead, 60 to 50.

And Bush, we were told, was reading big books up through August: Kai Bird and Martin Sherman's Robert Oppenheimer biography, for instance (784 pages), and Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's biography of Mao (801 pages). But Rove now tells Rush:

When we got too competitive last year, we both started reading John D. MacDonald mysteries, which are really delicious. He's a wonderful writer, a Floridian, who writes a wonderful set of mysteries, Travis McGee mysteries, and we both decided that we loved them. We were reading them quickly, enjoying them a lot, and then we realized this was being far too competitive. So we limited the number of John D. MacDonald mysteries we were both reading, so we could get back to the serious stuff.

Yet Bush, who early in the year was devouring 800-page tomes at the rate of seven a month, couldn't increase his monthly total even though Rove was beating him and they were reading 300-page mysteries. Curious, that.

I know, I know -- I'm taking this way too seriously. I can't wait to see how the numbers change as the tale of the great book-reading contest gets told and re-told by Bush and Rove.

*****

(Cross posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)

Monster Mush

Sinister G.O.P. imp Robert Novak knows where to hang the blame for the plague of Karl Rove:

But that victory in the 2000 election was so narrow — a margin of fewer than 1,000 votes in Florida and one Supreme Court justice — that it brought with it Democratic rage at Bush as an "illegitimate" president. In reaction, Rove worked to build a stronger Republican base, reaching out to Bush administration officials for party building. That is nothing new in American politics, but it has seemed more blatant in the past 6 1/2 years.

"In reaction...reaching out...party building." Karl Rove — exemplary democrat. Big "D" Democrats — insurrectionary haters.

My God, what have we done...to America?

Rove's Advice

So last week Rove told a bunch of Republican House candidates that it wasn't the war, it was the corruption that did them in last November. (Laughably wrong--but hey, work with Karl here.) Rove's advice: distance themselves from Mark Foley and Duke Cunningham.

Yeah, that'll work. All they have to do is convince the voters they have nothing whatsoever to do with Cunningham or Foley.

Well...and maybe Ted stevens.

Oh, and I guess Don Young.

And I suppose you should probably throw in John Doolittle. And Rick Renzi. Oh, and Jerry Lewis, Ken Calvert, and Gary Miller.

And maybe even Rove himself.

Cunningham and Foley? Nice try, Karl. It'll take a lot more than that to ditch the corruption rap. It's too pervasive...and that freezer full of cash Republicans like to talk about, well, that'll only go so far.

Because as I've said before, all this corruption isn't incidental to Republican ideology; it's the inevitable result. Corruption is what they believe in.

Cunningham and Foley: not going to do it. Maybe they could try running against themselves.

Update: Looks like Jay Carney reads us. (Okay, so he doesn't. Still.)

Telling Comment of the Day

Tony Snow, continuing White House attempts to denigrate Congressional oversight:

On CNN's The Situation Room, Snow said the White House "will respond in due course" to the Rove subpoena. But he added, "Let me point out that we have actually made Karl Rove available to that committee under conditions where he's going to tell the truth." [emphasis mine]

Right. Rove would tell the truth if those meanies in Congress didn't force him to swear that he's telling the truth. And force him to tell it on the record. Pull the other one, Tony.

This is Bush's Brain On Drugs

Karl Rove has been moonlighting from manipulating the War on Terra for political ends to manipulate an earlier jingoistic G.O.P. jingle, the long-lost War on Drugs:

The White House political affairs office directed the nation’s chief antidrug official and his deputies to appear at about 20 political events with vulnerable Republican members of Congress before the 2006 elections, a leading House Democrat charged Tuesday.

The lawmaker, Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, said the episode was further evidence of what Democrats have described as White House efforts at improperly politicizing federal agencies. Mr. Waxman said the pre-election appearances, by officials of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, which is obliged by law to be nonpolitical, were often accompanied by announcements of federal grants.

To which I can only say, "God Damn the Pusher Man."

Update: Think Progress shows how Rove was trafficking in this stuff.

Rove Linked To Siegelman Prosecution

Yeah, I know this is, in one sense, a local story, but it's also another link in the chain of evidence running from Rove to the Justice Department.

And by a Republican attorney. This will be interesting to watch.

In the rough and tumble of Alabama politics, the scramble for power is often a blood sport. At the moment, the state's former Democratic governor, Don Siegelman, stands convicted of bribery and conspiracy charges and faces a sentence of up to 30 years in prison. Siegelman has long claimed that his prosecution was driven by politically motivated, Republican-appointed U.S. attorneys.

Now Karl Rove, the President's top political strategist, has been implicated in the controversy. A longtime Republican lawyer in Alabama swears she heard a top G.O.P. operative in the state say that Rove "had spoken with the Department of Justice" about "pursuing" Siegelman, with help from two of Alabama's U.S. attorneys.

According to the affidavit, William Canary, GOP operative and Riley campaign advisor (and now President & CEO of the Business Council of Alabama), told a group on a conference call that there was no need to worry about Siegelman's election challenge because "his girls" would take care of it. "His girls" being, apparently, his wife Leura Canary, the US Attorney for the Middle District of Alabama, and Alice Martin, the US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. Canary also allegedly said that "he had already gotten it worked out with Karl and Karl had spoken with the Department of Justice and the Department of Justice was already pursuing Don Siegelman."

It looks like he got what he wanted.

Both U.S. attorney offices subsequently indicted Siegelman on a variety of charges, although Leura Canary recused herself from dealing with the case in May 2002. A federal judge dismissed the Northern District case before it could be tried, but Siegelman was convicted in the Middle District on bribery and conspiracy charges last June.

Wow! I'd always considered the Siegelman/Scrushy prosecution legitimate. In fact, my only problem with Richard Scrushy going to jail any time soon is that he should have already been there -- and stripped of his assets -- because of the fraud he perpetrated at HealthSouth. This report makes me take a second look. It would be much easier to refute these allegations if the Bush administration hadn't made the Justice Department its own political playground. And if Karl Rove weren't a complete sleazeball willing to do literally anything to win.

ADDENDUM: Here's an interesting tidbit. The affidavit alleges that Terry Butts, attorney for Riley and former Supreme Court Justice, was in on the conference call. Would that be the same Terry Butts who later served on Richard Scrushy's defense team?

Danny has also posted on this story at Doc's Political Parlor. And Left In Alabama has some good background on Rove's ongoing influence in Alabama politics (see the comments).

Rove Under Investigation by Office of Special Counsel

UPDATE: But will it be a White House whitewash? Melissa McEwan has more on Scott Bloch. Thanks, Tom!

This is coming from inside the Bush administration, and that is huge. The larger investigation came out of two narrower ones: the firing of US Attorney David Iglesias and a political PowerPoint presentation given to GSA employees by Rove aide Scott Jennings.

...the Office of Special Counsel is preparing to jump into one of the most sensitive and potentially explosive issues in Washington, launching a broad investigation into key elements of the White House political operations that for more than six years have been headed by chief strategist Karl Rove.

The new investigation, which will examine the firing of at least one U.S. attorney, missing White House e-mails, and White House efforts to keep presidential appointees attuned to Republican political priorities, could create a substantial new problem for the Bush White House.

First, the inquiry comes from inside the administration, not from Democrats in Congress. Second, unlike the splintered inquiries being pressed on Capitol Hill, it is expected to be a unified investigation covering many facets of the political operation in which Rove played a leading part.

And it sounds like they're deadly serious. We can hope.

"We will take the evidence where it leads us," Scott J. Bloch, head of the Office of Special Counsel and a presidential appointee, said in an interview Monday. "We will not leave any stone unturned."

Bloch declined to comment on who his investigators would interview, but he said the probe would be independent and uncoordinated with any other agency or government entity.

The decision by Bloch's office is the latest evidence that Rove's once-vaunted operations inside the government, which helped the GOP hold the White House and Congress for six years, now threaten to mire the administration in investigations.

The question of improper political influence over government decision-making is at the heart of the controversy over the firing of U.S. attorneys and the ongoing congressional investigation of the special e-mail system installed in the White House and other government offices by the Republican National Committee.

All administrations are political, but this White House has systematically brought electoral concerns to Cabinet agencies in a way unseen previously.

Wow! I can't believe Bush is letting one of his own appointees get away with this. Anyone want to place bets on how soon he'll try to fire Scott Bloch? Or could it be that he's finally realized Rove's machinations have become more of a liability than an asset?

Nah, this is the man who still has confidence in Alberto Gonzales.

The Opposite of Civil Rights

Back in December 2005, I wrote about the Bush administration's politicization of the DOJ civil rights section (follow-up posts here and here). Short version: the political leadership was overruling the career staff on sensitive cases such as the Georgia voter ID law and DeLay's Texas redistricting.

Well, everything old is new again. More precisely, every scandal we caught a glimpse of earlier in the administration eventually reappears in a more fleshed-out version.

The ever-more-essential TPM Muckraker reports on the details of the evisceration of the civil rights section:

According to Moore, his supervisor and the political appointees in the section consistently criticized his work because it didn't jibe with their pre-drawn conclusions....the real trouble came after he and three colleagues recommended opposing a Georgia voter I.D. law pushed by Republicans. After the recommendation, which clashed with the views of Moore's superiors, they reprimanded him for not adequately analyzing the evidence and accused him of mistreating his Republican colleague, with whom he'd had frequent disagreements. But it got worse. Moore said that his Republican superiors even monitored his emails, eventually filing a complaint against him with the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility for allegedly disclosing privileged information in one email (he was cleared of wrongdoing). Fed up, and worried that it was too dangerous to his professional future to remain there, he left.

Moore said that his experience was similar to others in the section who'd disagreed with conservative attorneys working at the Justice Department. Over the following year, all three of Moore's colleagues who'd joined him in opposing the law either left or were transferred out of the section.

To illustrate that this is more than just a matter of governing philosophy, here's some background on the Georgia bill:

According to the Recommendation Memorandum, George state Rep. Sue Burmeister, the sponsor of the bill, told section staff that "if there are fewer black voters because of this bill, it will only be because there is less opportunity for fraud," and that "when black voters in her black precincts are not paid to vote, they do not go to the polls."

All of this is coming up again because of the prosecutor purge. Rove's obsession with 'voter fraud' (as a way of driving down minority participation) drove the purge, just as it drove the neutering of the civil rights section. It's all connected, all part of the same effort to harness every aspect of government to the permanent Republican campaign for permanent rule.

And the people who are disenfranchised along the way? I suppose Rove would consider them collateral damage, if he considered them at all.

Update: Welcome visitors from Crooks & Liars! Hope y'all enjoy your visit (and take a look around--we've got some good stuff here), and come back anytime--we're a hospitable bunch.

Looking for Fraud in All the Wrong Places

This New York Times article about the chimerical nature of 'voter fraud' (and the administration's extraordinary efforts to find or invent it) reminds me of the one and only case of voter fraud of which I have personal knowledge.

It was in the early '80s in Santa Cruz, in a hard-fought and acrimonious local election. Santa Cruz had been dominated by chamber-of-commerce conservatives for years, but the balance was tipping toward the leftist faction associated with UCSC. In this very close election, the leftists finally got a majority on the City Council.

This guy I knew named JD had recently moved downtown from campus and re-registered to vote. After the election, JD went around telling people he had voted twice, because he was still registered on campus. He told us this as if it were just the cleverest thing in the world. We all told him it was unbelievably stupid. (It was not, however, atypical of JD; for example, one time in an IRA bar on St. Patrick's Day he ordered a Bushmill's. Not the sharpest tack in the carpet.)

The Chamber-of-Commerce conservatives did not take kindly to losing (they never do), and claimed that there was massive voter fraud in the form of students voting both on campus and in town. There was, of course, a huge investigation. The huge investigation uncovered exactly...one case. The case we all knew about. JD got off without any jail time, but with a shitload of community service.

The 'voter fraud' thing was bogus then, and it's bogus now. The Times piece pretty much confirms what we already know, but adds details about the nature of the cases the DOJ prosecuted, and the extent of the politicized obsession with 'voter fraud' in the department. The former is heartbreaking and infuriating (for example, one woman went to jail for a year for voting while on probation); the latter is essential background on the prosecutor purge.

Josh Marshall puts it all in perspective:

Republican party officials and elected officials use bogus claims of vote fraud to do three things: 1) to stymie voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote efforts in poor and minority neighborhoods, 2) purge voter rolls of legitimate voters and 3) institute voter ID laws aimed at making it harder for low-income and minority voters to vote....

The tie-in with the US Attorney story is that the White House and the Republican National Committee have used the power of the Department of Justice to accomplish those three goals that I outlined above. Only most of the relatively non-partisan and professional US Attorneys simply didn't find any actual fraud. Choosing not to indict people on bogus charges got at least two of the US Attorneys (Iglesias and McKay) fired....In turn they've been replaced by a new crop of highly-political party operative prosecutors who, in the gentle wording of the Times, "may not be so reticent" about issuing indictments against people who have committed technical voting infractions with no intent to cast a fraudulent ballot. Along the way, the fever to find someone, anyone guilty of committing even a technical infraction has landed folks like Ms. Prude in the slammer. They are what you might call the prosecutorial road kill in the Rove Republican party's effort to ride roughshod over American citizens' voting rights to entrench the GOP as the country's permanent electoral majority.

Who's running all this? Who's put it all in motion. Look at the documents that have already been released. It's been run out of Karl Rove's office at the White House.

Read the whole thing--both the whole things.

Man Overboard

Paul Kiel highlights a passage from today's New York Times:

[Gonzales'] appearance underscored what two Republicans close to the Bush administration described as a growing rift between the White House and the attorney general....

“I really think there’s a serious estrangement between the White House and Alberto now,” one of the Republicans said....

“They’re taking it seriously,” said the other of the two Republicans who spoke about the White House’s relationship with Mr. Gonzales. “I think Rove and Bolten believe there is the potential for erosion of the president’s credibility on this issue.”

They call it a 'rift'; I call it damage control. Plausible deniability is this administration's operating principle.

Rift, my ass. Rove is up to his ears in this, and they're cutting Gonzales loose to save him.

Articles I Didn't Finish Because I Fell Out of My Chair Laughing

Here's one:

In an interview this week in his windowless West Wing office, Karl Rove said that there is "very little" discussion about President Bush's legacy at the White House these days, only a focus on developing good policy that might have a long-term impact.

Right...because that's always been Rove's primary motivation.

Political Purge at the DOJ

As many of you already know, Bush has been purging the U.S. Attorneys (Josh Marshall is the source for this story)--seven so far, all forced to resign. He's using an obscure provision of the Patriot Act that allows him to appoint replacement U.S. Attorneys without Senate approval.

The obvious motive is defensive. For example, Carol Lam, who officially resigned yesterday (but was clearly pushed out), was in charge of the Duke Cunningham prosecution and the ongoing investigation into CIA aide (and Bush appointee) Dusty Foggo. Her replacement will be able to ensure that nothing too embarrassing comes out. There's still a whole lot of dirt to dig up, and the purge may be intended to keep it buried.

On the other hand, one appointment suggests an even more sinister motive:

Well, let's start with the estimable J. Timothy Griffin, US Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas since December 20th....

According to this Arkansas Times report, for the last ten years -- with the exception of two one year stint -- he has always worked as a Republican party opposition researcher digging up dirt on Democrats. Deputy Research Director for the RNC from 1999-2000. Research Director for the RNC from 2002-2005. Oppo Research Director for Karl Rove 2005-2006. Prior to 1999? Well, he was associate independent counsel investigating Henry Cisneros from 1995-96. After that he went to work for Dan Burton on the Hill to investigate Asian money contributions to the DNC.

Back in 2000, when he was in charge of digging up dirt on Al Gore, he apparently had a poster hanging on the wall behind his desk which read: "On my command - unleash hell on Al."

Can we expect the Department of Justice to 'unleash hell' on, say, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi? Are we going to see politically-motivated investigations of dozens of Democrats in Congress? I wouldn't bet against it.

To her credit, Senator Feinstein has denounced the purge and introduced a bill giving district courts the power to appoint interim replacement U.S. Attorneys. I'm afraid the damage is already done, and we're going to see the Department of Justice be reduced to a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Rove operation.

Update: Today's times has a story on this.

Other Update: Turns out Arlen Specter is responsible for adding this to the Patriot Act (confirmed here). And Gonzales responds to the controversy, saying "we in no way politicize these decisions." He also provides the biggest laugh line of the day:

Gonzales explained his expanded powers were necessary because federal judges -- who previously had appointed replacement U.S. attorneys -- were susceptible to cronyism and might appoint unqualified candidates.

Yes, you read that right: cronyism and unqualified candidates.

[That's all, folks]

Quote of the Day

Peter Baker, in the Washington Post:

So without corruption and complacency, [Rove] argued, Republicans could have kept control regardless of Bush's troubles and the war.

Yeah...right. Republicans could have kept Congress...if they hadn't exhibited the very characteristics that define the Republican party.

Somebody tell me again why anybody thought this guy was a genius?

[That's all, folks]

The Party of Gaknar

I'll admit it: reports of Rove's optimism have me spooked. I can't help it. I'm a Democrat; I expect the worst.

Which is I'm so glad to see Josh Marshall provide a little perspective:

Why is Karl Rove so confident? What does he know that the Dems and the pundit-predictors don't?

The answer is really, really simple: nothing. There's not anything he knows. In fact, he's not even confident. It's a bluff.

Marshall goes on to tell a story from 2000 that illustrates what Rove is trying to do now:

Conventional logic would have dictated sending Bush to swing states like Florida....[Rove] chose instead to send Bush to California and New Jersey -- states Bush could only have any hope of winning in a blow-out....Rove figured that he could accomplish more through convincing mainly the press, but also activists and even highly-plugged voters, that Bush was going to win big than he would by sending his guy into a state like Florida for some last minute retail politicking.

It's the bandwagon effect. Psyche out the other side. Act like you're winning and you'll charge up your activists/voters and demoralize the folks on the other side. Mainly, get the press to believe your hype and they'll do the charging up and demoralizing for you. As it happened, it was a really dumb decision in 2000. If not for faulty ballots and election stealing, Bush would have lost Florida and the presidency.

We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Literally. Fear is all they have.

The big kind of fear--the fear that triggers latent authoritarianism--we can fight only in limited ways. The other kind of fear, though--the demoralizing fear Rove seeks to induce in us--is entirely within our control. As the election approaches, we need to keep in mind Marshall's admonition...or better yet, just remember two words:

Actual size.

[That's all, folks]

No Fitzmas...Again

So Rove isn't going to be indicted. Oh well. Christy at Firedoglake reminds us that this isn't over, but it's still disappointing...and I'm not holding my breath waiting for a Cheney indictment. I'm just glad I was properly skeptical about Jason Leopold's Rove indictment story.

[Cross-posted at Property of a Lady]

[That's all, folks]

Rove Indictment: No Celebration Yet

Lots of people are excited about news of Rove's indictment. I thought about posting something, but decided against it. For one thing, I don't consider truthout.org a particularly reliable source; I'd like to see some more substantiation. For another, I really want this to be true--and I believe we have a moral obligation to be particularly skeptical of anything that could be wishful thinking. So I figured I'd wait and see.

Yesterday, Mark Kleiman posted some skeptical questions about the story:

1. Who would have told Jason Leopold, but no reporter with a mass outlet, that Rove had been indicted?

2. If the rumors are flying around the White House, why does Leopold have a monopoly on hearing about them?

3. If Rove has been told that he has been indicted, why doesn't he quit to spare Bush the embarrassment of having current, rather than a former, Assistant to the President mugged and booked? Even Clueless Claude Allen could figure out that much.

4. If Rove told Bolten that Rove has been indicted, why didn't Bolten reply, "The President accepts your resignation to spend more time with your family with great regret and great admiration for your loyal service"?

None of this is dispositive, but these do seem like pretty good reasons to remain skeptical.

Meanwhile, Jeralyn Merritt has talked to Jason Leopold; she is convinced he is sincere, but suggests he (and/or his sources) may be confused about the legal details of what's going on.

Bottom line: I'm really not expecting an indictment this week. Leopold has promised to out his sources if they lied to him, so on Wednesday we should know something more; until then, I'm assuming this is another non-story story.

[That's all, folks]