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Go Home Is Rove Aware of the Columns Someone Is Signing His Name To?

THE STUMP MARCH 22, 2012

Is Rove Aware of the Columns Someone Is Signing His Name To?

BY NOAM SCHEIBER

Our former colleague Jon Chait ran a sideline business these last few years calling Karl Rove on the various forms of projection he practiced when it came to criticizing Obama. But if Chait were still on this beat today, I’m sure he’d concede that he actually no idea how pathological this Rove-ian tick was back when he wrote all those blog items. 

Rove’s column in today’s Wall Street Journal, about the dishonesty of the recent Obama campaign documentary, is a true thing of beauty. You have to read it all to appreciate the full cinematic intensity of Rove’s mental projector, but the closing flourish tells you most of what you need to know:

As for the killing of Osama bin Laden, Mr. Obama did what virtually any commander in chief would have done in the same situation. Even President Bill Clinton says in the film "I hope that's the call I would have made." For this to be portrayed as the epic achievement of the first term tells you how bare the White House cupboards are.

Uh, for starters, the upshot of the Clinton statement is that he’s not at all sure he would have made the same call. Not that it was a no-brainer.

More importantly, if memory serves, Bush ran for re-election on a set of foreign policy achievements that summed to far less than the dismemberment of Al Qaeda and the assassination of the world’s most notorious fugitive. Is Rove suggesting that, had W. slayed bin Laden, the Bush re-election camp would have stayed mum about it? 

Oh, and there’s also this beaut: 

There's nothing [in the documentary] about the crumbling situation in Afghanistan, strained relations with allies like Israel, Mr. Obama's unpopularity in the Islamic World [emphasis added]. ...

Well, I’ll give Rove this: He knows a thing or two about unpopularity in the Islamic World. 

Follow me on twitter: @noamscheiber

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10 comments

You could have included the part about the union getting a share in the company while it's investors got hosed by the restructuring. I couldn't force myself to read much, or too closely, and arguments like that is why.

- GSpinks

March 22, 2012 at 6:58pm

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WSJ is a strange creature. I appreciate much of its reporting & content, love the weekend editions, and often find stimulating, challenging ideas in its unfortunate editorial pages, but all the good will & credibility it builds for itself goes into the sewer when it allows Karl f***ing Rove to spill ink there. Who approves this guy's columns? Edits them? Decided it was a good idea to add him to the payroll in the first place? He & Stephen Moore are so staggeringly stupid & wrong so consistently that it destroys an otherwise fine publication. It's a bizarro world where a newspaper that allows such a divisive figure with so many massive failures & burned bridges on his cv to write for it is also expected to be considered a valid platform bearer for about half of the American political spectrum. Is there anyone on "the left" who is Rove's equivalent? In counter-ideological terms, someone might say James Carville, maybe? But Carville is smart, witty, eloquent, fun, and has no major failures (massive failed wars, anti-gay bigotry to win Ohio) on his record to match Rove's.

- Konstantin

March 22, 2012 at 7:44pm

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If I recall correctly, wasn't Rove the navigator on the Titanic?

- Nusholtz

March 22, 2012 at 7:48pm

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Greg Sargent at the WaPost has a great blog post on this, as does someone at Forbes whose name I can't remember . . . which is unfortunate, because he's apparently the only guy at Forbes not toeing the magazine's nutty libertarian line. At any rate, his big news is that Karl Rove has endorsed Obama! Really. By Rove's journalistic standards, at least. And I agree with Konstantin's comment about the WSJ. The reporting is generally good, then you flip to the opinion section and . . . yikes. Fox News has taken over.

- ekeizer

March 22, 2012 at 9:36pm

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Indeed, ekeizer, that's a sharp Forbes post: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2012/03/22/shocker-karl-rove-endorses-obama-in-wsj-op-ed-really/ Evidently, Noam Scheiber didn't even see the original Rove column today. A WSJ editor's note indicates that the vital "I hope" part of Bill Clinton's quote was erroneously cut initially. The Rovian wrongdoing is even more nefarious than Scheiber realizes!

- Konstantin

March 22, 2012 at 10:09pm

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I was always under the assumption that Rove turned to projection as the only technique he could use to rewrite history so that the George W. Bush administration turned out a smashing success instead of a dismal failure, and that it was mainstream rather than radical, because he could trick us into believing that nothing Bush did was out of the ordinary. The example that jumps to mind is the big fuss at the beginning over Obama's "czars" who were able to get their job without Senate confirmation. That was meant to address criticism that Bush snubbed his nose at the Senate when he gave John Bolton a recess appointment to the UN after the Senate had REJECTED his nomination, not just refused to bringing it up.

- TedFrier

March 23, 2012 at 6:06am

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The WSJ is owned by Murdoch, as is Fox News. It's not surprising from time to time some Murdochian lunacy is published there.

- AllanL5

March 23, 2012 at 8:53am

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Karl Rove is right. I starkly remember all those nuanced Bush 2004 campaign ads in which the campaign reflected on the failures and unanticipated difficulties of the Iraq War, the failure of the 2001 tax cuts to unleash unlimited prosperity and the inability to catch Bin Laden or destroy Al Qaeda three years after the 9/11 attacks. Why can't Obama live up to such a simple standard of 30-second truth-telling?

- wildboy

March 23, 2012 at 10:01am

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Because Americans would never vote for a candidate who was "unpopular in the Muslim world?" Yeah, swing voters always put that at the top of their list: Would lower gas prices, check. Would help the economy, check. Popular in Islamabad, hmm, better do some more research before I cast this ballot.

- DP1024

March 23, 2012 at 10:42am

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Hear hear, Wildboy. I myself was most impressed with the WSJ article co-written Rove and Paulson in the fall of 2008: "De-Regulation Of Financial Markets: Holy Shit Were We Wrong On That One".

- Tristan

March 23, 2012 at 10:48am

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