Karl Rove's America

Paul Krugman finally weighs in. From the New York Times courtesy of Eschaton:

John Gibson of Fox News says that Karl Rove should be given a medal. I agree: Mr. Rove should receive a medal from the American Political Science Association for his pioneering discoveries about modern American politics. The medal can, if necessary, be delivered to his prison cell.

What Mr. Rove understood, long before the rest of us, is that we're not living in the America of the past, where even partisans sometimes changed their views when faced with the facts. Instead, we're living in a country in which there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth. In particular, there are now few, if any, limits to what conservative politicians can get away with: the faithful will follow the twists and turns of the party line with a loyalty that would have pleased the Comintern.

Click here for the rest.

I've pointed out that the real story about the Rove scandal is how the White House lied repeatedly to the American public in order to justify a war that Bush's neo-con advisors are on record as having wanted for years before their boy came to power. Krugman, however, pulls back a bit further and sees the context that includes everything. Lies, supported by a massive chorus of chest-thumping pundits and politicians, are the meat and potatoes of the Bush administration. Social Security, stem cell research, civil rights, abortion and birth control, economic policy and tax cuts, energy, everything they say of any importance at all is served up with a heaping bowl of lies. Rove is simply an example of all this. It's one thing to have political differences; it's quite another to just make shit up: Republicans wield their untruths at democracy's peril. America cannot function in this way.

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