Recounting the speech Illinois Senator Richard Durbin made last week, comparing interrogation methods at the Guantanamo detention center to those of terrorist regimes, Karl Rove asked: "Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year? …Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals."
Really. It's that simple?
Rove also derided liberal American's response to the attacks on 09.11.01: "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."
Here's part of what I think about that:
• If you say something that isn't true, that means you lied.
• If you claim someone said or did something they didn't say or do, that means you lied.
• If you do that repeatedly and on purpose, that makes you a liar.
Is there a more egregious liar in American political life today than Karl Rove?
The nominations are open…
3 comments:
I'm a 3rd party kind of guy, but for THIS election, I'm voting Rove, Rove, Rove!
yer killin me
yeh, i caught the Durbin thing -- though i wouldn't characterize the portion of his speech i heard in quite the way you did, Chad. He said something like If i read this to you and you didn't know where it came from, you would think it described the actions of people we all agree are the bad guys.
If Mr. Durbin was saying Americans, representing America, have done/are doing things unworthy of the American ideal, I agree with him. And that seemed to be the spirit of his seemingly half-hearted apology a few of days later. He didn't apologize for the core argument; he apologized that someone -- you perhaps -- might have thought he was painting everyone in an American uniform as a Nazi/Stalinist/Maoist.
This is not Mr. Durbin's attitude toward service people. In March 2005, for example, he offered an amendment to the new banruptcy bill seeking...well, here's the language: To protect servicemembers and veterans from means testing in bankruptcy, to disallow certain claims by lenders charging usurious interest rates to servicemembers, and to allow servicemembers to exempt property based on the law of the State of their premilitary residence. [
The bill passed. Mr Durbin's amendment failed, 58-38. Except Mr. Jeffords of Vermont and Mr. Specter of Pennsylvania, everyone who sought to exempt servicepeople from harsh treatment under a more stringent bankruptcy law were Democrats -- the liberals Mr. Rove slandered this week in New York. Put another way, no Republican except the embattled Mr. Specter, voted to protect American troops from losing the farm while deployed in Afghanistan or Iraq. You tell me what that means juxtaposed against Karl Rove's comments.
A better man than me would have posted his embarrassment that Howard Dean spoke so broadly and contemptuously of Republicans in the last month. That man was not available at the time, but he is now. Some of my best friends are Republicans...
My objection to Mr. Rove is what appears to me to be a long and storied history of lying. T.S. Eliot's wrote:
The last temptation is the greatest treason,
To do the right thing for the wrong reason
If this is true of doing the right thing, how much more is it true of doing the wrong thing?
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