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The disgraced man once known as Bush's Brain actually has the nerve to say that the reason President Obama's poll numbers are slipping is because he's wasting time trying to fix our broken f*&king health care system and that's not one of the real "bread and butter" issues that Americans care about.

This from the man who led George W. Bush from an 80% approval rating to one of the lowest approval ratings in the history of America. And George Bush is considered one of the worst President in American history... Oh, yeah, and Karl couldn't help but drool all over himself when he said that Obama is focusing on climate change and never stops talking about his Nobel Peace Prize. When have you ever heard the president mention his prize outside of when he won it, and now that he's picking it up? What a liar.

Rove: ..and he's spent this year talking about health care and talking about greenhouse gas emissions and the environment and his Nobel Peace Prize and not talking about the thing that Americans are concerned about, which is jobs and the economy...

BillO: Bread and butter issues.

You may not agree with some of the measures President Obama has taken in dealing with the economy or health care for that matter, but he's certainly addressed it.

Forget George W. Bush for a minute. Well, you can never forget what he's done to our country so please don't. Ronald Reagan's popularity hit the skids early on in his presidency about the same time as Obama's has, when unemployment jumped under his leadership. Of course, Reagan didn't have a global financial catastrophe and two wars to deal with at the time, either.

Andrew Kohut writes:

The new president described above is, of course, Barack Obama — but, to a startling degree, it is also Ronald Reagan. A close look at Gallup’s polling of reactions to Reagan’s first few months in office provides striking parallels with what Pew Research Center polls now find about opinions of Mr. Obama. And a consideration of the Reagan experience may well give some clues as to what lies ahead for the 44th president.

The public’s bottom lines on Presidents Reagan and Obama early in their presidencies have so far been quite comparable: 60 percent and 59 percent of the public approved of the new presidents in mid-March, respectively. (Going into April, the lines diverge as a sympathetic public response to the March 31 attempt on Reagan’s life boosted his numbers, at least for short period.)---

But the public’s patience with Reagan was relatively short lived. By November, when the jobless rate had risen to 8.3 percent, from 7.5 percent in January, a plurality of the public believed that Reaganomics would hurt, not help, their family finances. So began Ronald Reagan’s approval ratings slide. By December, according to Gallup, 49 percent approved of his job performance while 41 percent disapproved. With the economy faltering, his approval rating fell to 42 percent by July 1982, with 46 percent disapproving. His rating hit a low of 35 percent early the next year.

So BillO's claim that Obama's polls are lower than anyone's in history at this point in his presidency is bogus: Obama's poll numbers, in fact, are closely tracking Reagan's.

And Reagan didn't have a black helicopter-teabagger movement created by a liberal version of FOX News or psycho talk radio that actively sought to overthrow him to deal with either.

Only FOX News would give Karl Rove a job as a lead analyst because they so desperately want the Democratic Party out of power and want to make their audience forget all about George W. Bush. Nice try, you political hacks.

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First question, why is this man on my television screen instead of sitting in a jail cell somewhere? Karl Rove first claims that the stimulus package didn't work even though as Pat Garofalo over at the Think Progress' The Wonk Room noted:

...the Congressional Budget Office found that it has created or saved 600,000 to 1.6 million jobs, with plenty of punch still to come.

Rove is then asked by Greta Van Susteren if the Bush administration is responsible at all for the shape the economy is in. Rove tries to blame the economy melting down on Fannie and Freddie and on Chris Dodd and Barney Frank--it's all their fault! This is the same crap Rove was peddling in his Wall Street Journal column back in January. Barry Ritholtz does a nice job of debunking Rove's nonsense here--Karl Rove’s Factually Challenged Housing Revisionism.

VAN SUSTEREN: Here's the problem with what you suggest. I mean, that may be the suggestion for the economy, and I don't mean to suggest that decisions are made on politics. But to be sort of practical and realistic, the fact that there will be an election next November, if they cut the corporate tax, as you say, for big corporations, accelerate depreciation for small businesses, the first thing I would do as an opponent is saying, Well, he finally came around to the Republican thinking. And it took him a year or so or a year behind the ball on this in terms of the role of the recession. Plus, we've spent all this money in the stimulus package and we've got ourselves now in a huge spending situation. So you know, that solution may help the economy, but doesn't that make him more vulnerable politically?

ROVE: Well, it does say that he changes course. But I mean, look, it's not working. We were told that if we did nothing, unemployment would go to 8 percent. We did exactly what the president wanted, his $787 billion stimulus bill, and unemployment has gone to 10 percent. We've gone from a situation -- when he came into office, there were 142.1 million Americans working. Today there are 138.5 million Americans working. We did what he said and it has not gotten appreciably better.

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David Gergen and Anderson Cooper actually had the nerve to compare the White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers not appearing before Congress to Harriet Miers and Karl Rove ignoring Congressional subpoenas. It's bad enough that the press has spent as much time as they have on this overblown story, but to compare the White House not wanting to give Republicans another scalp in the form of Desiree Rogers--who Gergen admits was not the one responsible for the President's safety--to Karl Rove and Harriet Miers refusing to testify in the U.S. Attorney scandal is utterly ridiculous.

If the press had spent half the time they did on the party crashers story asking why Rove and Miers didn't show up to testify, or on the U.S. Attorney scandal at all, maybe the public would be more aware of how Republicans have been stealing elections, how they used the Department of Justice as a political arm of the Republican Party, and how they filled the D.O.J. with partisan hacks like Monica Goodling.

Transcript via CNN.

COOPER: Let's dig deeper with senior political analyst and former presidential adviser David Gergen. David testified before Congress during the Whitewater investigation, when he was a member of President Clinton's staff.

So, the White House is saying, all right, separation of powers, that's why she can't testify. Do you buy that?

DAVID GERGEN: Not really.

COOPER: That is usually used for extremely serious things, not a social secretary.

GERGEN: Yes, not really, Anderson. But let me say a couple of things, preliminarily. I think people ought to get off her back, personally, on a couple of counts. First of all, the one thing this White House has done well is, they have had a ton of people come through that White House, children and various people from poor neighborhoods. And she's been right at the center of that.

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Has there ever been a bigger dick in the history of dicks than Karl Rove? I mean, really.

Rove, on O'Reilly last night, after President Obama's speech at West Point:

It took him 80-some-odd days to do this, it took us 50-some-odd days to remove the Taliban from power after 9/11, and it took him some 80-odd days to say, 'I'm gonna give McChrystal three-quarters of what he requested in order to get done the job I told him to do on March 27.'

Yeah, and you guys did such a bang-up job keeping the Taliban out of power, didn't you, Karl?

There's a special stomach-churning quality to watching the people who created one of history's great clusterf--ks telling the people saddled with the job of cleaning it up that they're doing a crummy job.

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December 01, 2009 NBC Today Show

Media Matters has more--Rove falsely claimed Obama didn't "speak out" about troops in Afghanistan:

In an interview on NBC's Today, Fox News contributor Karl Rove falsely claimed that in 2007, Barack Obama "didn't speak out" against the Bush administration's war strategies for Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, Obama advocated prioritizing the conflict in Afghanistan and repeatedly criticized Bush's Iraq war policy.

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More fear mongering from Bill-O and KKKarl on the "show trial" of Khalid Sheikh Muhammed. I want to know why Karl hasn't had his "show trial" yet. Apparently Rove thinks that judges in this country have absolutely no control over what happens during their court proceedings or he would not be making these ridiculous claims. The only thing Rove and his ilk are actually worried about is outrage over what the Bush administration did in our name if the general public hears too much about it.

Transcript via Nexis Lexis.

O'REILLY: And joining us now from Washington, FOX News analyst Karl Rove.

Now, look, as I said, I appreciated the counselor coming in here because he knew he was going to get, you know, a tough interview. But the bigger picture is he had absolutely no, no salient points to justify this show trial in New York City. And I'm saying to myself, I think this is going to damage the Obama administration and the entire country in front of the world in ways that are just going to be unbelievable. Am I wrong?

ROVE: Oh, no, you're absolutely right. This is an utter, complete disaster. It will hurt America's security and America's interests all around the world. And I understand that lawyers have an obligation to mount the most powerful defense they can mount to make every argument they can make to provide their clients every opportunity to be heard in the court of law. And that is exactly - they're going to undermine the methods that we use to capture these people in war by saying well, you wouldn't do that to an ordinary criminal who knocked over the 7/11. They're going to say the chain of evidence, the treatment of these people, you didn't mirandize them. They're going to make a mockery, a mockery of our Constitution by trying to apply it to people who are not mere criminals but are, you know, enemy combatants.

And it is going to damage our country all around the world by providing a stage, you know, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed since his capture in Pakistan has wanted nothing more than to have the opportunity to spew his hatred all clear around the world and hurt America. And we're going to give it to him.

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SNL spoofs Fox News for their coverage of the Virginia and New Jersey governors’ races and the NY-23 Congressional race. Jason Sudeikis' Glenn Beck impersonation is eerily close to the mark.

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Gotta' love that GOP/Fox News echo chamber with this latest talking point. Lamar Alexander repeats his 'enemies list' accusation made earlier in the day on the Senate floor.

From Think Progress--GOP Communications Arm In Action: Republican Senator Takes Up Fox News’ ‘Enemies List’ Attack On Obama:

For the past couple of weeks, Fox News’ Sean Hannity has been aggressively pushing the talking point that the Obama White House is compiling an “enemies list.” That wild accusation came in response to Obama communications director Anita Dunn’s suggestion that Fox News operates as a “communications arm” of the GOP.

“I mean, is this an enemies list? Seems like it to me,” Hannity said on his program last Wednesday. “They want to come after the Fox News Channel,” the right-wing pundit complained. Almost every night in recent weeks, Hannity has badgered his guests, demanding that they take up his talking point. Last night, Liz Cheney took the bait:

HANNITY: It seems to me, it’s almost like an enemies list. Is that a fair description?

CHENEY: Well, uhh, yeah.

[...]

Yesterday, Hannity won his biggest convert yet. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) took to the Senate floor and read Sean Hannity’s talking points into the congressional record:

ALEXANDER: I want to make what I hope will be a friendly suggestion to President Obama and his White House, and it is this: don’t create an enemies list. […]

So in conclusion Mr. President, here’s my point. These are unusually difficult times with plenty of forces encouraging us to disagree. Let’s not start calling people out and compiling an enemies list.

Watch a compilation:

As Think Progress also noted, Karl Rove accused the White House of keeping an enemies list on Fox News Sunday last weekend. And now we have Alexander following suit. For someone complaining that the White House is being unfair in claiming that Fox News is a communications arm of the Republican party, Alexander is certainly doing a good job of proving it as he does it. My only question might be which one is leading and which is following? I would imagine it's Fox following since I'm pretty sure Hannity gets all of his talking points straight from the RNC.

Steve Benen weighed in on this today as well:

While I don't doubt this will make for weeks of breathless speculation on Fox News, and give a wide variety of pundits endless entertainment, that doesn't make it any less ridiculous.

The most obvious problem here is that Republicans are defining Nixonian tactics down. In effect, Alexander argued this morning that the White House's opponents and detractors will go after the president and his team, but if they respond in any way, they're necessarily acting in ways similar to the disgraced 37th president.

Look at Alexander's list. Is the White House pushing back against the Chamber of Commerce's efforts to derail the administration's agenda? Sure, what's wrong with that? Did the White House impose a "gag order" on Humana? Of course not, that's absurd. Is the White House pointing out that Fox News is an arm of the Republican Party? Yep, as well it should. Has the president criticized financial institutions that brought the global economy to the brink of a depression? Yes, but I'm not sure what's wrong with that. Has the White House criticized an insurance industry that screwed over its customers and continues to fight against sensible reform efforts? You bet, but again, that's a good thing.

Alexander, Gregg, and assorted political reporters make it seem as if the White House should be a non-partisan, non-political, take-punches-but-don't-respond entity. In other words, Obama and his team are expected to just lose every fight, and take every criticism. To do anything else leads to Nixon comparisons.

It's possible the political world has a very short memory, but it's worth remembering, as Eric Boehlert does, that Nixon's White House "declared war on his enemies (including news outlets), and used the full power of the federal government to exact his bouts of revenge."

When Nixon didn't like a news outlet, he directed federal prosecutors to investigate journalists, including going through their taxes. Nixon assembled actual enemies lists, and used the power of his office to target and try to destroy his adversaries.

That any serious person would compare these tactics to routine political efforts at the White House is insane.

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White House communications director Anita Dunn has said Fox News "often operates as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican party." Karl Rove, former senior advisor to George W. Bush, responded by saying "the White House is engaging in its own version of [Nixon's] media enemies list" Sunday.

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I hadn't seen Eric Burns, the president of Media Matters, on TV previously, but he appeared on Countdown with David Shuster yesterday, and finally said what has needed saying for some time:

Fox News is not a news source. It's a political propaganda operation. And it needs to be treated that way.

Shuster and Burns were launching off Fox's most ludicrous recent endeavor to smear the Obama administration, by using videos of schoolchildren to charge that Obama wants to "indoctrinate" them. As they discuss, this is so hypocritical and absurd that it's hard to believe anyone actually is buying it:

SHUSTER: So explain to me, why is it indoctrination when kids sing about President Obama, but it's patriotism when kids sing about President Bush and FEMA?

BURNS: Well, David, it's not indoctrination to anybody except Karl Rove, Josh Bolten, Roger Ailes -- the rest of the Bush administration in exile over at Fox News, because they are trying to push a political agenda. And they're trying to destroy this administration, and they'll use any means necessary to do it.

And just to give you a little example of this, James O'Keefe, who is the author of one of the suspect ACORN videos that there have been a lot of questions surrounding, told Chris Wallace recently on Fox News that he was employing tactics that would, quote, "destroy his political enemies." So that's what this is about.

There's nothing abnormal about folks talking and children learning about their president and learning to be -- learning about their democracy through talking about the president. I did it when I was a kid.

Then they got to what this is really all about:

SHUSTER: And is that the general theme here with the right-wing media, I mean, undermining the president by manufacturing controversies, because many of the actual Obama policies are favored by the majority of Americans?

BURNS: Absolutely. We've seen it day after day. You know, Glenn Beck is the smearer in chief over at Fox News. And we see new charts, you know, documenting some new vast conspiracy theory every day, new attacks, and it's a constant barrage.

And I'll tell you, this right-wing noise machine has been ginned up. It's never been more ferocious, and their goal is simple -- as Rush Limbaugh stated at the beginning of the year -- they want Obama to fail. Roger Ailes said that this is the Alamo for conservatives and that Fox is the voice of the opposition.

So, this is no longer a news organization. This is a political organization, and their aim is to destroy a progressive policy agenda. They'd rather win in the ballot box than see any sort of real debate on health care. It's a real shame.

Every liberal who even considers going on Fox to act as props for their propaganda machine should stop and think again.

Moreover, every consumer of the news -- conservative, centrist, or liberal -- needs to understand that Fox is not a reliable source of information.

Mainstream media in general have become less reliable, but most of them strive to be factually accurate, even if they skew ideologically somewhat. But this skew has more to do with framing and news selection than the actual reporting.

This is not the case at Fox. It deliberately broadcasts falsehoods and fake information to serve its ideological agenda.

No doubt this makes the Kool-Aid drinkers of the right happy. But for anyone else -- particularly anyone who relies on accurate information for their business or occupation or the livelihoods -- Fox News is a wasteland or outright disinformation that anyone with smidgen of intelligence will avoid.

We need more people like Eric Burns making this point.

Jon Stewart takes the GOP hypocrites to task for wanting ACORN investigated while defending the likes of Karl Rove and refusing to investigate torture, and for freaking out over a video of school children praising President Obama.

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Rachel Maddow talks to former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias about the pressure put on him to go after ACORN for voter fraud allegations and how Karl Rove wanted to use the issue of voter fraud as a wedge issue to win elections. As Rachel notes sadly, that plan is still paying dividends with the Democrats being all too happy to cave into political pressure by the Republicans instead of standing up for ACORN.

MADDOW: We have previously reported on this show how corporate interests opposed to ACORN`s really successful efforts to raise the minimum wage targeted the group using Republican-allied P.R. firms that proudly specialized in demonizing their opposition.

But ACORN has not just been targeted by corporations who worry that ACORN`s advocacy for living-wage ordinances and an increased minimum wage will hurt their corporate bottom line. ACORN has also been the subject for years of a purely political smear campaign, a campaign engineered by Republicans who are threatened by ACORN`s work to register young and poor and minority voters.

The American voter is typically older and more wealthy than the typical American, and that tends to give the Republicans an electoral edge among voters as compared to the preferences of the populations at large. But ACORN`s registration drives have gone some distance to changing that. Over the past five years, ACORN registered close to 2 million voters. And, yes, the groups of people that ACORN typically registers tend to vote for Democrats.

Over the last few election cycles, fear of a younger, less wealthy, and, frankly, less white electorate led Republicans, especially in swing states, to go after ACORN aggressively, and, in fact, to try to gin up charges against them, to try to make their voter registration efforts in general seem suspect and perhaps to bring down the group entirely. And when I say "ginned up," I`m not exaggerating.

Do you remember the U.S. attorney scandal, the alleged fire ring of U.S. attorneys because of U.S. political considerations? Recall what that scandal was really about. In 2006, nine U.S. attorneys were fired, surprisingly and suddenly, by the Department of Justice under George W. Bush.

Former U.S. attorney David Iglesias -- one of those U.S. attorneys who lost his job despite positive job reviews -- maintains that his pink slip came after he resisted pressure from Republicans to pursue bogus voter registration cases involving ACORN. The pressure began as early as 2002 when Mr. Iglesias says in his book "In Justice," he received an e-mail from the Department of Justice in Washington, quote, "suggesting, in no uncertain terms" that U.S. attorneys "offer whatever assistance we could in investigating and prosecuting voter fraud cases."

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I always find myself uttering low mordant chuckles whenever Karl Rove comes on the teevee (always Fox) to complain about how mean and nasty those Democrats are.

And as you would expect, he is appalled that not just Jimmy Carter but Bill Clinton as well happen to believe that there is a powerful racial element coursing through the more venomous opposition to President Obama's efforts to obtain health-care reform. Or so he told Sean Hannity last night:

Rove: Look his [Clinton's] comment was like Jimmy Carter -- irrational and unbelievably partisan. This is the kind of stuff that he said routinely during the 1990s about his political opponents, denigrating them personally, questioning their motivations.

Yes, that was coming from the mouth of Karl Rove. And not even a whisper of irony.

Rove: Why can't he just accept the fact that people disagree with President Obama's health care plan as they disagreed with his health care plan, because they represent a spirit of liberalism and a government control and government domination of a very personal decision that ought to be left between a doctor and his patient as to the decision for our health.

Problem is, there is in fact data out there that strongly suggests there's a powerful connection between opposition to health-care reform and voters with racist attitudes about Obama. In other words, that Carter and Clinton are right, and Karl Rove and the entire Fox network are wrong.

Steven Livingston at the Washington Post has more:

As evidence of the link between health care and racial attitudes, we analyzed survey data gathered in late 2008. The survey asked people whether they favored a government run health insurance plan, a system like we have now, or something in between. It also asked four questions about how people feel about blacks.

Taken together the four items form a measure of what scholars call racial resentment. We find an extraordinarily strong correlation between racial resentment of blacks and opposition to health care reform.

Among whites with above average racial resentment, only 19 percent favored fundamental health care reforms and 57 percent favored the present system. Among those who have below average racial resentment, more than twice as many (45 percent) favored government run health care and less than half as many (25 percent) favored the status quo.

No such relationship between racial attitudes and opinions on health care existed in the mid-1990s during the Clinton effort.

It would be silly to assert that all, or even most, opposition to President Obama, including his plans for health care reform, is motivated by the color of his skin. But our research suggests that a key to understanding people's feelings about partisan politics runs far deeper than the mere pros and cons of actual policy proposals. It is also about a collision of worldviews.

This is correlative, of course; the data doesn't indicate a cause-effect relationship. Rather, as Levingston explains, both arise out of a right-wing authoritarian worldview.

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I thought the president was very good Wednesday night and his speech has seemed to change the media's dynamic on health care as well as start to bring people back to reality on this issue. He was more forceful combating Republican lies than ever been before and that was much appreciated.

It did freak Karl Rove out a little bit on FOX. On The Factor, he was upset that the president debunked the phony "death panel" lies that conservatives and teabaggers have been yelling about every since they discovered Isakson's amendment. (Isakson is a Republican, I might add.) Karl said that conserva-teabaggers were only upset about the living will option and never brought up death panels, so he tried to call Obama a liar, but that's the lie.

Rove conveniently forgot Sen. Charles Grassley talking about "death panels," or Betsy McCaughey doing same. And of course there's the wacky Sarah Palin Facebook post that was promoting the idea that Obama wants to kill grandma. Rove basically lied by pretending that conservatives were only upset about Isakson's language.

Still, I thought Obama was too nice to the Republicans all night. I know it was more theater than reality because he still wants America to believe that there's hope for bipartisanship, but it bothers me. All they have done is spread lies about health-care reform the entire time, but the president just isn't going to be as partisan as I'd like him to be. I have to accept it.

I actually didn't think he would mention the public option at all since the Queen, Olympia Snowe, asked him not to, but he had to because of us. We can still battle to have it included because he's still talking about it and has campaigned on it.

He wasn't as forceful about it as I wanted, but he's talking to many people that have been lied to for months by Republicans, so I kind of understand his phrasing of it. He did open up the possibility of other options which made me shudder, but we'll keep pushing. We're his base and the base will help save him in the long run.

Sen. Tom Harkin had another take on it today on MSNBC. He said that because Obama said the public option was only a small part of the solution for health care then that would force many others to vote for the bill even if a public option is included. By downplaying its significance he believes it strengthens the chances that it gets passed. I hadn't looked at it that way before, but with Rahm and his Blue Dogs trying to undo the public option I don't have as much faith in his premise. There's still a long way to go and we'll keep fighting.

One of the best writers on health care has been Jonathan Cohn of TNR, and he writes:

Looks like there's some news in the speech after all. Quite a bit.

On the policy front, President Obama tonight endorses, clearly and unambiguously, a requirement that everybody obtain insurance--that is, an individual mandate. He has not done that before, not this explicitly.

He also says employers will have to provide insurance or bear some of the costs. That's not news exactly; he's said that before. But it's part of the same package.

{}

Also of interest: A promise to provide low-cost, bare-bones policies right away--merely as a stopgap, until full reforms kick in. (This is an effort to make sure Americans see at least some benefits right away.) Elsewhere, Obama talks about malpractice reform--again, more explicitly than he has before, presenting it as an effort to reach across the aisle.

And the public plan? He gives a lengthy, strong defense of the idea. It could have come straight out of the literature of groups like Health Care for America Now -- or the writings of Jacob Hacker. But he also makes clear, to left as well as right, that he's open to compromise.

Those seem like the major developments on the policy front. The tone is pretty striking, too. Obama reaches out to Republicans in several places. But he also comes down hard--very hard--on opponents who are merely out to defeat reform.

And I wish he would have mentioned more liberals to the nation that have been working hard to reform health care instead of praising John McCain, but he did close with a nice ode to Ted Kennedy.

The Kennedy passage was beautiful. He even used the dreaded "L" word, which I haven't heard in that setting without a sneer for ... well, ever. I don't know how many people can hear that plea for empathy and community, but I hope some did.

By the way, FOX had their news scroll running during the entire speech and it highlighted as many crazy stories as it could. And then the first ad they broadcast after the speech was one where a Canadian woman said Canada's government-run health care almost killed her. That was timed just right for the teabagger audience.

Some things never change.

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Who better for Bill O'Reilly to get a "fair and balanced" opinion from following President Obama's speech to Congress than serial liar Karl Rove? Media Matters has the run down on this one.

Rove advances "glaring misstatements" and "distortions" in criticizing Obama speech:

Purporting to examine President Obama's health care speech, Karl Rove claimed that while discussing "the so-called lies and misstatements about his proposal," Obama "made a series of very glaring misstatements or distortions." In fact, it was Rove who was advancing falsehoods and distortions.

[.....]

Rove distorts "what people were concerned about" regarding "panels to kill off senior citizens".

[.....]

Contradicting CBO, Rove suggests "most companies" will "dump the coverage" under House bill.

[.....]

Rove distorts Obama statement to claim he is "not shooting straight" on deficit.

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