Dealing With Political Disaster

From the Washington Post courtesy of the Daily Kos:

But now, facing what is clearly a full-scale political disaster, Rove and a handful of other masterful political operatives have gone into overdrive. They are back in campaign mode.

This campaign is to salvage Bush's reputation.

Like previous Rove operations, it calls for multiple appearances by the president in controlled environments in which he can appear leader-like. It calls for extensive use of Air Force One and a massive deployment of spinners.

It doesn't necessarily include any change in policy. It certainly doesn't include any admission of error.

It utilizes the classic Rovian tactic of attacking critics rather than defending against their criticism -- and of throwing up chaff to muddle the issue and throw the press off the scent.

It calls for public expressions of outrage over the politicization of the issue and of those who would play the "blame game." While at the same time, it is utterly political in nature and heavily reliant on shifting the blame elsewhere.

Click here for the rest.

Down here in Louisiana, we know better, but I fear that the rest of the country might not be so lucky. Heh. "Lucky." It takes the destruction of a major city and thousands of deaths to make us all so "lucky" to know that the White House is full of shit. But I digress. Karl Rove, who really ought to already be in jail, is currently doing what he does best, what he has been wildly successful doing for years now. Remember last November? Bush was able to minimize discussion of his own awful record and focus the media and just enough of the public on the slime campaign against Kerry such that he won. That sad truth, especially in this journalistically disabled environment, is that lies and mud-slinging work. And Rove is the master.

This morning I heard a couple of minutes of that scumbag drug addict Rush Limbaugh trashing state and local officials in Louisiana: "They're blaming the President because they're the ones who actually failed, and they're all Democrats!!!" As usual, that's a fucking lie, especially because local Republicans have harshly criticized the President as well. But lies work, and Rove's campaign-mode gambit is paying off with the base--my Dad, one of the faithful, has already sent me a couple of forwarded emails blaming both America's "socialist" policies for the disaster and, as usual, gays and lesbians. Thank god for the "delete" button. Those bastards are going to keep this up, and if national Democrats are true to form, they'll be too scared to "politicize" an event that was blatantly political before Hurricane Katrina even had a name. There's a good chance that the US political culture may learn absolutely nothing from New Orleans, and that thought is so sickening that I almost cannot bear it.

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