February 17, 2014

The wingnut blogs are in a tizzy because disgraced ex-Bushie, Karl Rove attacked Ted Strickland on Fox News for speaking out against Chris Christie.

Rove precisely demonstrated Strickland to be a critically flawed messenger of the Democratic Party talking points on Christie.

I find Powerline's post laughable because of who Karl Rove is. He shouldn't be the voice attacking Strickland since his own past behavior trumps anything almost every other politician has ever done, but I'll get to Rove's own behavior shortly.

On Sunday, Fox News was doing its best to try and help out embattled Gov. Chris Christie from the Bridgegate scandal that has marred his presidential ambitions. First up on Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace repeatedly criticized Ted Strickland for "shadowing" Chris Christie. And then came Karl Rove's turn since he was opposite Strickland and instead of addressing the response that Strickland made about Christie's scandal, which is that the governor knew and he is lying, or he is the most inept, incompetent chief executive imaginable, but:

WALLACE: Karl, let me bring you in and pick up on the Governor Strickland's point. The governor, Governor Christie's deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, knew. His appointment to the Port Authority, David Wildstein, knew.

Doesn't it strain credulity? How do you respond to Governor Strickland's statement that he's either lying, Christie is lying, or he's incompetent?

ROVE: Well, first of all, I think Governor Strickland is correct. The reason the Democrats are doing this is because Chris Christie is a strong potential candidate in 2016. They're going to try to smother every Republican presidential possibility they can because they know that this race in 2016 is going to be difficult for the Democrats, hard to get a third term, particularly after the two terms of Obama.

I think the Democrats, however, will be better off picking another voice to go after Governor Christie. When Governor Christie found out about these two individuals and what they had done, he immediately fired them.

Let's remember -- let's go back to 2008 and Joe the Plumber. Governor Strickland's own appointee as head of the employment commission was found to have been accessing confidential governmental data bases to find out private information about Joe the Plumber and leaking it to the press.

Now, is Governor Strickland to adopt his standards either incompetent or lying and simply because it was his appointee who did these things?

Let's step back and look at this. Let the process go forward and be careful to throw stones like Governor Strickland is throwing at Governor Christie. I understand why they want to get him out of there.

STRICKLAND: Well, two things. First of all, the person who did that left my administration and secondly, no information was ever leaked to the press. That's just not a true statement. So, you know, things happen. You hold people responsible. And Governor Christie has held Bridget Kelly responsible. But we still do not know who told Bridget Kelly to do what she did.

Yes, director Helen Jones-Kelley, of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services was suspended by Governor Strickland over her role in having Joe De Plumber's personal info looked into and then she resigned shortly afterward, but there was no leak of Joe's information to the press that Rove vociferously claimed. Karl then continued to hammer at him as if he was trying to imitate Patrick Fitzgerald. Did Chris Wallace know Rove was going to sandbag Strickland before hand? Notice how Rove completely failed to respond in any way about the Chris Christie scandal because he knows he may have to fund raise for him in the future.

Now let's ask Rove about his own past indiscretions which are too many to cite here, but remember, it wasn't too long ago that he confirmed to Robert Novak that Valerie Plame was indeed a CIA agent. Here's a few of the many, dare we say, inconsistencies in Rove's many, many Valerie Plame grand jury appearances.

Rove, who confirmed Plame’s identity to then-Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper, had repeatedly told the president, the White House press secretary, the press and Fitzgerald’s grand jury, that he had no role in the leak. But in his fourth and fifth grand jury appearances, after Rove and his lawyer realized that an email message they had already turned over to Fitzgerald proved he had spoken to Cooper, Rove changed his story. He insisted that he had honestly forgotten, until his memory was jogged by the email.

According to James B. Stewart’s 2011 book about celebrated liars, Tangled Webs, the FBI agents on the investigative team were “unanimous that Rove should be charged with false statements, and Fitzgerald seemed to agree.” But for reasons he has never publicly explained, Fitzgerald ultimately chose not to indict Rove either for the leak or for obstruction of justice. While much could have been gleaned from key investigative documents requested by a congressional committee, the Bush White House wouldn’t let Fitzgerald release them.

If you believe his faulty memory routine then I have a few bridges to sell you. That's just one of many shi*&y things Rove has been involved in since the days of Richard Nixon. Let's not forget the John McCain-black baby smear in South Carolina he orchestrated.

Rove invented a uniquely injurious fiction for his operatives to circulate via a phony poll. Voters were asked, "Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain...if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?" This was no random slur. McCain was at the time campaigning with his dark-skinned daughter Bridget, adopted from Bangladesh.

It worked. Owing largely to the Rove-orchestrated whispering campaign, Bush prevailed in South Carolina and secured the Republican nomination.

Listen up Dems, if Karl Rove tries to pull this schtick on you in the future then use what I'm giving you here. My God, the man was in on the decision to attack Iraq for no reason at all.

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