TW3 — and Cousin Karl

November 28th, 2007

That Was The Week That Was … damned entertaining, if you dismiss the lies and ignorance and disturbing bits and pieces, and of course the whole of it doesn’t say anything flattering about humankind, but we’re used to that. A couple of laughs are buried in here, one that has to do with the cannibal [you KNEW there'd be one!] and another regarding the new Australian prime minister … after you find that last, I’d like you to consider this — if not his own, then whose?

Got a bonus for you today — I watched Karl Rove interviewed by Charlie Rose the other night and … by cracky … that Karl is slicker ‘n snot. If Dubby got the entirety of his world view from Cousin Karl, then I finally get why we are where we are today. Below, you’ll find some commentary on Karl’s allegation that Dubby was PUSHED into the Iraq War before he was ready. And who was the dastardly perp that would do such an evil thing? Why CONGRESS, of course, and all against George W’s wishes.

Pathological, ain’t it?

TW3 and a bonus, of the day.

Jude

HARPER’S WEEKLY REVIEW
November 27, 2007

Teams of biologists in Japan and Wisconsin discovered
new methods for transforming human skin cells into
“induced pluripotent stem cells.” Both techniques employ a
retrovirus to inject the cells with four “master regulator”
genes that reprogram the cells’ function. The Wisconsin
team, directed by James A. Thompson, who pioneered
the harvesting of embryonic stem cells, culled its
skin cells from foreskins. The Japanese team conducted
their preliminary research on mice, with a cancer gene
among the regulators, and created in the process a
mischief of clone mice, 20 percent of which developed
cancer. President George W. Bush was said to be “very
pleased” that the innovation might render the use of
embryonic stem cells obsolete, but critics said it was
too soon to tell whether the synthesized stem cells would
prove as versatile as those from embryos. An American
nuclear scientist projected that the number of deaths
caused by depleted uranium in ammunition fired on Iraq
would exceed those caused by the bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. “The environment is now completely radioactive,”
said Leuren Moret. “The genetic future of the Iraqi people,
for the most part, is destroyed.” Ian Smith, the Rhodesian
prime minister who promised 1,000 years of white rule in
Africa, died, and authorities in Zimbabwe were arresting
satirists. Australian voters elected the Labor Party’s
Kevin Rudd prime minister, replacing conservative John
Howard, a Bush ally who failed to retain his own seat in
Parliament. Rudd, who has been videotaped eating his own
earwax, said he would push for Australia to ratify the
Kyoto Protocol on climate change, leaving the United States
the lone holdout. Fourteen thousand refugees fled wildfires
in Malibu, California, and the British government admitted
that it had lost computer disks containing the personal
information of more than one third of its citizens.

Exiled prime minister Nawaz Sharif returned to Pakistan. “I
have come,” he said, “to save this country.” There was
a power vacuum in Lebanon after the Parliament failed
to elect a new president, and in Annapolis, Maryland,
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice convened a meeting of
Middle Eastern leaders, excluding Iran and Hamas, which
controls the Gaza Strip. “We must not view Annapolis as
a failure,” Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said before
the summit started. “Nothing good will come out of it,”
said Riham Abu Khater, a 17-year-old Gazan woman attending
a protest march. “Good will only come from the language
of fighting, and from force.” Hamas pledged to pack
more explosives in its homemade rockets, and Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said, “Participation in
this summit is an indication of the lack of intelligence
of some so-called politicians.” The Interfaith Rainbow
Coalition Against Homosexuality in Uganda protested a
summit of British Commonwealth leaders in Kampala. “I asked
President Museveni to get us an island on Lake Victoria
and we take these homosexuals and they die out there,”
said Sheikh Ramathan Shaban Mubajje of an earlier meeting
he had with Uganda’s head of state. “If they die there,
then we shall have no more homosexuals in the country.”

Former White House spokesman Scott McClellan released an
excerpt of his forthcoming memoir. The passage states that
he “unknowingly” lied when he denied that White House aides
Karl Rove and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby participated in
the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. McClellan vaguely
confesses that “Rove, Libby, the vice president [Dick
Cheney], the president’s chief of staff [Andrew Card],
and the President himself” were “involved” in his relaying
“false information,” but he stops short of saying that
Bush and Cheney knew they were telling him to lie. Al
Gore visited the White House, and amateur investigators
in Russia found the charred bones of two teenage children
of Tsar Nicholas II murdered along with their father,
mother, and three siblings by Bolshevik agents in 1918,
dispelling the rumor that a Romanov prince or princess
had escaped execution. Abraham Bolden, a former Secret
Service agent, told reporters that a plot by Cuban
exiles to kill President John F. Kennedy in Chicago
was uncovered three weeks before his assassination in
Dallas. The would-be assailants, who had allegedly rented a
motel room overlooking Kennedy’s motorcade route and were
said to possess automatic rifles with telescopic sights,
were never caught, and the investigation, Bolden claimed,
was covered up. Kennedy’s 86-year-old sister Eunice was
hospitalized with an undisclosed illness, and UNAIDS,
the United Nations agency that fights AIDS, lowered
its estimate of the number of people infected with the
disease worldwide, from 39.5 million to 33.2 million. Armin
Meiwes, a convicted German cannibal, was elected leader
of his prison’s Green Party chapter and announced that
he had become a vegetarian. Citing Schrodinger’s cat,
cosmologists speculated that humans’ observation of dark
matter, beginning in 1998, might bring about the premature
destruction of the universe.

– Christian Lorentzen
http://harpers.org/archive/2007/11/WeeklyReview2007-11-27

Rove: “Congress Pushed Bush to War in Iraq Prematurely”
Paul Abrams, HuffPo
November 25, 2007

You are not going to believe this, well, actually you will… According to Karl Rove (on Charlie Rose), the Bush Administration did not want Congress to vote on the Iraq War resolution in the fall of 2002, because they thought it should not be done within the context of an election. Rove, you see, did not think the war vote should be “political”.

Moreover, according to Rove, that “premature vote” led to many of the problems that cropped up in the Iraq War. Had Congress not pushed, he says, Bush could have spent more time assembling a coalition, and provided more time to the inspectors.

If you are like me, you have stopped reading/listening, and are rushing to get your anti-emetic.

It is worth remembering that the Senate in the fall of 2002 was controlled, barely, by Democrats. Get it? George Bush, we are being told, wanted to delay, wanted to hold back, wanted to take the time to build a coalition and let the inspectors finish their job, but that damn Congress just pushed him into it. George Bush, you see, is a careful, prudent, leader, deeply concerned about the consequences of premature.

Get it? If Biden, Clinton, Dodd or Edwards is part of the Democratic ticket, the Republicans will run a campaign charging the Senate Democrats with rushing to judgment, of pushing the poor President to premature…(well, you fill in the blank)….

Not that Iraq is that big of an issue. Rove claims that, if Iraq had been a big issue, that Joe Lieberman, who was pro-war, could not have won in Connecticut, defeating receiving more Democratic, Independent and Republican votes than any of his opponents.

I have purposefully NOT provided the (obvious) answers to his claims because to answer is to give him control of the argument. That’s Rove’s tactic, and I have written about that many times in these pages.

Instead, this should be used as a trigger to talk about Rove’s history of dissembling, how that is reflected in the Bush Administration’s entire approach to public policy and public information. Bush, through Rove, should be attacked for trying to escape responsibility and accountability. And, it will help to make some historical references to rulers whose tenure was so dismal that they could not allow historians to provide objective analyses, and thus try to write the history themselves.

As might have been predicted, Rove raises “historical revisionism” to new depths, what may become known as “hysterical Rovisionism.”

Reminder to Rove: There’s no memory hole to hide your lies on Iraq
David Edwards and Nick Juliano, Raw Story
Wednesday November 28, 2007

The latest claim from the onetime “Mayberry Machiavelli Karl Rove” so closely mirrors a discarded chapter from a George Orwell novel that his estate should sue for “copyright violation,” MSNBC host Keith Olbermann said Tuesday.

What is President Bush’s former political brain-trust trying to sell the American people now?

The architect of Bush’s rise to power made the outrageous assertion last week that the Iraq invasion was the fault of Congress, not the White House. The Bush administration — according to Rove’s revisionism — was simply aghast that a critical and controversial vote to let the president unleash US troops against Saddam Hussein came just weeks before lawmakers were to stand for re-election.

“One of the untold stories about the war is … this administration was opposed to voting on (the authorization the use of military force) in the Fall of 2002,” Rove claimed with a straight face and apparently uncrossed fingers in a pre-Thanksgiving appearance on PBS’s The Charlie Rose Show.

Of course, as Olbermann notes, “It’s an untold story because it isn’t true.”

Using a “rogue Web site called WhiteHouse.gov,” Olbermann quickly undercuts Rove’s assertion.

“Despite Rove’s claim that the White House opposed voting on Iraq in the Fall of 2002,” Olbermann said, “on the first full day of Fall that year, the president urged Congress to pass an Iraq resolution, quote, ‘promptly.’ A week later, the president and the House Republicans agreed on an Iraq resoulution. A week after that President Bush was ‘pleased’ with the House vote on Iraq, and a week after that Mr. Bush signed the authorization for the use of military force in Iraq.”

Olbermann, and his guest Arianna Huffington, noted the similarity of Rove’s apparent attempt to rewrite history to the dystopian role played by the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s classic 1984.

“We’ve all used George Orwell references and 1984 references so much that the estate of Eric Blair ought to be suing us for copyright violations,” Olbermann said. “But this really is that book, isn’t it? Can’t you just see John Hurt [who played lead character Winston Smith in a film version of the book] talking into the dictaphone rewriting the old newspapers with Karl Rove over his shoulder to eliminate inconvenient facts? Is this not the practical application of he who controls the past controls the future.”

Huffington reminder her guest that technology in the 21st century makes it much harder to shuffle inconvenient facts down the memory hole.

“The only problem is when 1984 was written, Google and Lexis Nexis did not exist, and now they do,” she said.

“I don’t think there is any possibility that what Karl Rove is saying has any connection to the truth,” Huffington said later. “There is just too much evidence. … We have the Downing Street Memo that shows that they were already fixing the intel. They were determined to use 9/11, to use the president’s incredible popularity at the time, to use the spinelessness of the Democrats to take us to war as fast as possible. It doesn’t matter what Karl Rove says. The truth is the truth. It exists. It’s real. And he can’t change it.”

Wednesday morning, hosts on MSNBC’s Morning Joe found Karl Rove’s rewritten history equally unbelievable.

This video is from MSNBC’s Countdown and MSNBC’s Morning Joe, broadcast on November 27 and 28, 2007 [open link for video.]

Karl Rove’s Shameless, Remorseless, Soulless Attempt to Rewrite History
Arianna Huffington, HuffPo
November 28, 2007

I went on Countdown last night to talk about what Keith Olbermann called Karl Rove’s “attack on history.”

During an interview with Charlie Rose, the erstwhile Boy Genius pulled out his bucket of whitewash and audaciously claimed that “one of the untold stories” about the war in Iraq is that the Bush administration had been “opposed’ to Congress holding the vote authorizing the president to use military force in Iraq just a few weeks prior to the 2002 elections because “we thought it made it too political.”

Too political? For Karl Rove? That’s like saying something was too bloody for Count Dracula.

He went on to paint a picture of a White House pushed into war, and laid the blame for much of what has happened since on a Congress that had “made things move too fast.”

If not for Congress, you see, there would have been more time for weapons inspections, and to build a broader coalition.

It was a satiric tour de force worthy of Jonathan Swift or Stephen Colbert — but Rove wasn’t joking. He actually expected us to buy his load of b.s. Watching Rove, two things were perfectly clear: his disdain for the truth and his contempt for the American people know no bounds.

Rove’s appearance was the work of a shameless, remorseless, soulless political animal taking the first steps on what will no doubt be a high profile and lucrative march toward historical revisionism. He knows that he stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the fanatics responsible for the worst foreign policy disaster in American history — not exactly the best thing to put on your post-government resume — so he is hell-bent on replacing reality with the latest incarnation of The Big Lie.

A student of history, Rove is obviously also up on his Orwell: “Who controls the past, controls the future.”

Unfortunately for Rove, this isn’t 1984; we now live in the Age of Google, and YouTube, and Lexis-Nexis searches. So the refutation of his lies is just a click away.

The evidence that it was President Bush and Vice President Cheney — and not Congress — who were hungry for war is overwhelming. For starters, we have Bush’s own words before the vote, when he explicitly told Congress that “it’s in our national interest” to get the vote “done as quickly as possible.” And the insistence of then-Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld that “delaying a vote in Congress would send the wrong message.” And the words of then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle who says that when he asked Bush in September 2002 why there was such a rush for a vote on Iraq the president “looked at Cheney and he looked at me, and there was a half-smile on his face. And he said: ‘We just have to do this now.’”

And there is the insider evidence provided by Richard Clarke, who wrote that within hours of the 9/11 attacks, this administration had its heart set on heading into Iraq. And from Paul O’Neill, who made it clear that invading Iraq had been Bush’s goal before he had even learned where the Oval Office supply closet was.

Even now, with his approval ratings scraping the bottom of the historical barrel, Bush still dominates the Congressional agenda on the war. And Rove wants us to buy that back in the heady days of 2002, when the president was still riding a wave of support forged by 9/11, his desire for caution and reasoned action were overridden by a war hungry Congress? “We don’t determine when the Congress votes on things,” Rove told Rose.

“The Congress does.” I guess he and Bush landed on the whole “I’m the Decider” thing later (maybe after they orchestrated that triumphal landing on the Abraham Lincoln).

The truth is that the zealots in the White House were not about to allow their desires to invade Iraq — which had been laid out years earlier by the Project for a New American Century — be quashed by anything as piddling as the facts or the evidence or reasoned debate or Congress. Especially a Congress populated with Democratic leaders so rattled and timid that to call them spineless would be an insult to invertebrates everywhere.

Indeed, it was the perfect political environment for an administration intent on shoving a war down the throats of Congress and the American people.

Let’s remember, this was the time when the administration had pulled together the White House Study Group (which included Rove himself) with the express mission of marketing the war. These people weren’t in the mood to wait, they were in the mood to sell, sell, sell. The Downing Street Memo showed that by July of 2002 they were already fixing the intel to sell the war. By August 2002 the White House was already using Judy Miller and the New York Times as prime advertising space. And by September 2002, Condi Rice was already warning of smoking guns turning out to be mushroom clouds, and Cheney was using aluminum tubes to make the case that Saddam was “actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.”

So the record is irrefutable: the drumbeat of war coming from the White House couldn’t have been louder. And no amount of 5-years-down the road spinning by Karl Rove is going to change that truth.

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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