Gayle in MD
03-14-2010, 12:20 PM
<span style="color: #000066">I had the proud distinction this morning on C-Span2, of joining the ranks, even if momentarily, of several respected journalists who have been bashed publically by Karl Rove, after exposing his colossal, absurd lies.
Oh yes, Mr. Rove was as hot as a firecracker, as I reminded him that in fact, he had confirmed for two journalists, both Matt Cooper, and Robert Novak, Mrs. Plame's identity, as had Libby also, confirmed to Judith Miller.
The smoke was nearly visible, busting loose from his ears, as Mr. Rove blew up like a weeble, until finally, he excploded!
Apparently, whenever one gets the best of him, exposes some of his many pathological lies, he falls back on the same insult, spewing, hissing and red faced, at his accuser, his most oft used juvenile attack, lashing out, saying that they have been <span style='font-size: 20pt'>drinking too much swamp water,</span> lol.
In my case, I had the pleasure of watching his face turn blood red, on live television, while I listed a number of indisputable facts, regarding his involvment in the outing of Valarie Plame, prefaced by a suggestion that his title for his new book be changed from <span style='font-size: 20pt'>Courage And Consequences</span>, to <span style='font-size: 20pt'>Lies And Disaster</span>LOL, adding other documentation about the Niger/Yellowcake lies, and the concerted effort by the Bush White House to discredit and slander Joe Wilson, and expose his wife's identity, former CIA Secret, NOC Agent, Valarie Plame.
LMAO! What a pleasant way to start the day, on a sunday morning, doing my part to condemn one of the worst liars in history.
The second link, gives an example of how he uses this same lashback, whenever his lies are dismantled.</span>
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/opinion/14rich.html
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">The New Rove/Cheney Assault On Reality
Published: March 13, 2010
Frank Rich
THE opening salvo, fired on Fox News during Thanksgiving week, aroused little notice: Dana Perino, the former White House press secretary, declared that “we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.” Rudy Giuliani upped the ante on ABC’s “Good Morning America” in January. “We had no domestic attacks under Bush,” he said. “We’ve had one under Obama.” (He apparently meant the Fort Hood shootings.)
Now the revisionist floodgates have opened with the simultaneous arrival of Karl Rove’s memoir and Keep America Safe, a new right-wing noise machine invented by Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz and the inevitable William Kristol. This gang’s rewriting of history knows few bounds. To hear them tell it, 9/11 was so completely Bill Clinton’s fault that it retroactively happened while he was still in office. The Bush White House is equally blameless for the post-9/11 resurgence of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Iran. Instead it’s President Obama who is endangering America by coddling terrorists and stopping torture.
Could any of this non-reality-based shtick stick? So far the answer is No. Rove’s book and Keep America Safe could be the best political news for the White House in some time. This new eruption of misinformation and rancor vividly reminds Americans why they couldn’t wait for Bush and Cheney to leave Washington.
But the old regime’s attack squads are relentless and shameless. The Obama administration, which put the brakes on any new investigations into Bush-Cheney national security malfeasance upon taking office, will sooner or later have to strike back. Once the Bush-Cheney failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran again come home to roost, as they undoubtedly and explosively will, someone will have to remind our amnesia-prone nation who really enabled America’s enemies in the run-up to 9/11 and in its aftermath.
There’s a good reason why Rove’s memoir is titled “Courage and Consequence,” not “Truth or Consequences.” Its spin is so uninhibited that even “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job!” is repackaged with an alibi. The book’s apolitical asides are as untrustworthy as its major events. For all Rove’s self-proclaimed expertise as a student of history, he writes that eight American presidents assumed office “as a result of the assassination or resignation of their predecessor.” (He’s off by only three.) After a peculiar early narrative detour to combat reports of his late adoptive father’s homosexuality, Rove burnishes his family values cred with repeated references to his own happy heterosexual domesticity. This, too, is a smoke screen: Readers learned months before the book was published that his marriage ended in divorce.
Rove’s overall thesis on the misbegotten birth of the Iraq war is a stretch even by his standards. “Would the Iraq war have occurred without W.M.D.?” he writes. “I doubt it.” He claims that Bush would have looked for other ways “to constrain” Saddam Hussein had the intelligence not revealed Iraq’s “unique threat” to America’s security. Even if you buy Rove’s predictable (and easily refuted) claims that the White House neither hyped, manipulated nor cherry-picked the intelligence, his portrait of Bush as an apostle of containment is absurd. And morally offensive in light of the carnage that followed. As Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, said on MSNBC, it’s “not a very comforting thing” to tell the families of the American fallen “that if the intelligence community in the United States, on which we spend about $60 billion a year, hadn’t made this colossal failure, we probably wouldn’t have gone to war.”
Rove and his book are yesterday. Keep America Safe is on the march. Liz Cheney’s crackpot hit squad achieved instant notoriety with its viral video demanding the names of Obama Justice Department officials who had served as pro bono defense lawyers for Guantánamo Bay detainees. The video branded these government lawyers as “the Al Qaeda Seven” and juxtaposed their supposed un-American activities with a photo of Osama bin Laden. As if to underline the McCarthyism implicit in this smear campaign, the Cheney ally Marc Thiessen (one of the two former Bush speechwriters now serving as Washington Post columnists) started spreading these charges on television with a giggly, repressed hysteria uncannily reminiscent of the snide Joe McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn.
This McCarthyism has not advanced nearly so far as the original brand. Among those who have called out Keep America Safe for its indecent impugning of honorable Americans’ patriotism are Kenneth Starr, Lindsey Graham and former Bush administration lawyers in the conservative Federalist Society. When even the relentless pursuer of Monicagate is moved to call a right-wing jihad “out of bounds,” as Starr did in this case, that’s a fairly good indicator that it’s way off in crazyland.
This is hardly the only recent example of Republicans’ distancing themselves from the Cheney mob. The new conservative populist insurgency regards the Bush administration as a skunk at its Tea Parties and has no use for its costly foreign adventures. One principal Tea Party forum, the Freedom Works Web site presided over by Dick Armey, doesn’t even mention national security in a voluminous manifesto on “key issues” as far-flung as Internet taxes and asbestos lawsuit reform. Ron Paul won the straw poll at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference after giving a speech calling the Bush doctrine of “preventive war” a euphemism for “aggressive” and “unconstitutional” war. Paul’s son, Rand, who has said he would not have voted for the Iraq invasion, is leading the polls in Kentucky’s G.O.P. Senate primary and has been endorsed by Sarah Palin.
In this spectrum, the Keep America Safe crowd is a fringe. But it still must be challenged. As we’ve learned the hard way, little fictions, whether about “death panels” or “uranium from Africa,” can grow mighty fast in the 24/7 media echo chamber. Liz Cheney’s unsupportable charges are not quarantined in the Murdoch empire. Her chummy off-camera relationship with a trio of network news stars, reported last week by Joe Hagan in New York magazine, helps explain her rise in the so-called mainstream media. For that matter, Thiessen was challenged more thoroughly in an interview by Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” on Tuesday than he has been by any representative of non-fake television news.
What could yet give some traction to the Keep America Safe revisionism is the backdrop against which it is unfolding: an Iraq election with an uncertain and possibly tumultuous outcome; the escalation of the war in Afghanistan; and an increasingly cavalier Iran. If any of these national security theaters goes south, those in the Rove-Cheney cohort will claim vindication in their campaign to pin their own failings on their successors.
Obama may well make — or is already making — his own mistakes. And he will bear responsibility for them. But they must be seen in the context of the larger narrative that the revisionists are now working so hard to obscure. The most devastating terrorist attack on American soil did happen during Bush’s term, after the White House repeatedly ignored what the former C.I.A. director, George Tenet, called the “blinking red” alarms before 9/11. It was the Bush defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who lost bin Laden in Tora Bora, not the Obama Justice Department appointees vilified by Keep America Safe. It was Bush and Cheney, with the aid of Rove’s propaganda campaign, who promoted sketchy and often suspect intelligence about Saddam’s imminent “mushroom clouds.” The ensuing Iraq war allowed those who did attack us on 9/11 to regroup in Afghanistan and beyond — and emboldened Iran, an adversary with an actual nuclear program.
The Iran piece of the back story doesn’t end there. As The Times reported last weekend, Dick Cheney’s former company, Halliburton, kept doing business with Tehran through foreign subsidies until 2007, even as the Bush administration showered it with $27 billion in federal contracts, including a no-bid contract to restore oil production in Iraq. It was also the Bush administration that courted, lionized and catered to Ahmed Chalabi, the Machiavellian Iraqi who lobbied for the Iraq war, supplied some of the more egregious “intelligence” on Saddam’s W.M.D. used to sell it, and has ever since flaunted his dual loyalty to Iran.
Last month, no less reliable a source than Gen. Ray Odierno, the senior American commander in Iraq, warned that Chalabi was essentially functioning as an open Iranian agent on the eve of Iraq’s election, meeting with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and other Iranian officials to facilitate Iran’s influence over Iraq after the voting. (Dexter Filkins of The Times reported on Chalabi’s ties to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2006.) As the vote counting began last week, fears grew that he could be the monkey wrench who corrupts the entire process. It’s no surprise that Chalabi, so beloved by Bush that he appeared as an honored guest at the 2004 State of the Union, receives not a single mention in Rove’s memoir.
If we are really to keep America safe, it’s essential we remember exactly which American politicians empowered Iran, Al Qaeda and the Taliban from 2001 to 2008, and why. History will be repeated not only if we forget it, but also if we let it be rewritten by those whose ideological zealotry and boneheaded decisions have made America less safe to this day.
</div></div>
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Karl called Me Far Left Liberal Who Has Been Drinking too Much Swamp Water:
by James Moore
Link to Article
When the book "Bush's Brain" was published, my co-author Wayne Slater and I assumed we were done with Karl Rove. We had exercised what we believed was a journalistic responsibility to inform the public about Karl and, of course, made a few dollars selling books. We both had other projects and ideas we wanted to explore.
Karl, though, was influencing much of what was taking place in our country and in the wider world. Interest in him increased. We knew him better than others and felt inclined to write a sequel to our first book. "The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power" will be published in a few weeks by Random House/Crown.
And Karl is not happy.
Mr. Rove does not deign to call me. I am beneath contempt. When FOX News and Brit Hume ran an excerpt of an interview with me in the film based on the original book, <span style='font-size: 20pt'>Rove responded by describing me as a "far left wing liberal who has been drinking too much swamp water."</span> The president's big brain advisor, therefore, calls my co-author when he has a peeve with our work. Last week, Rove called Slater several times to begin his ritual dissembling about information in "The Architect." He wants his lawyer to talk to our publisher's lawyers. He wants to pretend like he has been cooperative and we are obstinate and did not listen to his side of any story. He is, as always, beginning his spin in advance of any public interest the book may generate.
Just as he did with "Bush's Brain," Rove managed to acquire an early galley version of the new book. He is disturbed about several matters but appears most deeply troubled about how the narrative proves he has had a complex relationship with convicted felon Jack Abramoff. Information provided to us for the book by an eyewitness and participant in Rove and Abramoff meetings gives lie to Rove and the White House's claims that Abramoff was barely known by the administration. Karl has always known who has money to spend on politics and how to use those people. Our witness, who also told the same story to federal investigators, details meetings between Rove and Abramoff that show the two were using each other for their own political ends.
After reading the galley, Rove called Slater and denied the meetings ever occurred. He wants us to believe that our source simply made up the events and also lied to federal investigators. Of course, Karl Rove is the same man who claimed he did not speak to reporters about Valerie Plame's identity until her name was published by Robert Novak and he is the same person who told the world Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. I do not believe anything he says nor should anyone in our country. Nonetheless, he wants us to provide him with dates that these meetings allegedly happened so that he can check them against his calendar to see if he was in Kuala Lumpur or Washington. Is there anyone left in America who might believe any document provided by Karl Rove? I will not. Nor will I provide him any material or other information for him to use in the building of his spin.
Karl is pathological and has spent so much of his life distorting the truth that he presently has difficulty discerning the difference between what he believes is real and what actually is true. His goal, obviously, is to be able to tell other journalists and pundits that he tried to cooperate with us and show us that we had bad information. He wants to raise doubt and claim good faith communications. He has done nothing but consistently refuse to speak to us since "Bush's Brain" was published. Regardless, he has called Slater constantly wanting to put his lawyer in touch with our publisher's counsel. Rove is too smart to complain publicly about our book because he knows it will drive attention and possibly sales so he calls Slater and demands to talk off the record so he can file his grievances.
Rove is also upset about information in "The Architect" that explores his family history. Ordinarily, a political reporter will ignore a subject's background when writing about issues being promoted by a particular political operative. Their personal life is not relevant unless it contradicts a public posture on a relevant issue. Rove's zealous approach to promoting the anti-gay marriage amendment, however, prompted curiosity during the course of researching for the book. We will leave it to students of Freud to deconstruct what we discovered through on the record interviews, but it will be clear that Mr. Rove's motivations for promoting anti gay marriage legislation has as much to do with his own background as it does the political utility of motivating the conservative and fundamentalist base for the GOP.
But what I will not leave to Karl Rove is the freedom to frame this story in a way that suits his interests. He has already begun to call his political operatives in Texas and elsewhere to suggest that Slater and I, who have about 70 years of journalistic background between us, have simply resorted to making up material to sell books. We did not, of course. Karl is the expert at creating information to serve a purpose.
And there are thousands of dead Americans and Iraqis whose ghosts bear witness to Rove's ability to lie and spin for political ends.
</div></div>
http://www.neilrogers.com/news/articles/2006081604.html
<span style="color: #000066">I didn't spend a lot of time, searching to see how many other of we distinguished Americans have had the honor of earning the Rove <span style='font-size: 20pt'>Swamp Water </span>vitriol, but it did my heart good, just to know that it is one of his standby, go/to, rages, when he feels naked and exposed, and that I was so honored to be one of the recipients.
I hadn't intended to brag about my good fortune, my honored stamp of distinction, until I signed on and immediately saw, what I knew without reading it, would be a radical RW, skewed reference to this mornings charished event...</span> /forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/laugh.gif /forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/grin.gif
Oh yes, Mr. Rove was as hot as a firecracker, as I reminded him that in fact, he had confirmed for two journalists, both Matt Cooper, and Robert Novak, Mrs. Plame's identity, as had Libby also, confirmed to Judith Miller.
The smoke was nearly visible, busting loose from his ears, as Mr. Rove blew up like a weeble, until finally, he excploded!
Apparently, whenever one gets the best of him, exposes some of his many pathological lies, he falls back on the same insult, spewing, hissing and red faced, at his accuser, his most oft used juvenile attack, lashing out, saying that they have been <span style='font-size: 20pt'>drinking too much swamp water,</span> lol.
In my case, I had the pleasure of watching his face turn blood red, on live television, while I listed a number of indisputable facts, regarding his involvment in the outing of Valarie Plame, prefaced by a suggestion that his title for his new book be changed from <span style='font-size: 20pt'>Courage And Consequences</span>, to <span style='font-size: 20pt'>Lies And Disaster</span>LOL, adding other documentation about the Niger/Yellowcake lies, and the concerted effort by the Bush White House to discredit and slander Joe Wilson, and expose his wife's identity, former CIA Secret, NOC Agent, Valarie Plame.
LMAO! What a pleasant way to start the day, on a sunday morning, doing my part to condemn one of the worst liars in history.
The second link, gives an example of how he uses this same lashback, whenever his lies are dismantled.</span>
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/opinion/14rich.html
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">The New Rove/Cheney Assault On Reality
Published: March 13, 2010
Frank Rich
THE opening salvo, fired on Fox News during Thanksgiving week, aroused little notice: Dana Perino, the former White House press secretary, declared that “we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.” Rudy Giuliani upped the ante on ABC’s “Good Morning America” in January. “We had no domestic attacks under Bush,” he said. “We’ve had one under Obama.” (He apparently meant the Fort Hood shootings.)
Now the revisionist floodgates have opened with the simultaneous arrival of Karl Rove’s memoir and Keep America Safe, a new right-wing noise machine invented by Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz and the inevitable William Kristol. This gang’s rewriting of history knows few bounds. To hear them tell it, 9/11 was so completely Bill Clinton’s fault that it retroactively happened while he was still in office. The Bush White House is equally blameless for the post-9/11 resurgence of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Iran. Instead it’s President Obama who is endangering America by coddling terrorists and stopping torture.
Could any of this non-reality-based shtick stick? So far the answer is No. Rove’s book and Keep America Safe could be the best political news for the White House in some time. This new eruption of misinformation and rancor vividly reminds Americans why they couldn’t wait for Bush and Cheney to leave Washington.
But the old regime’s attack squads are relentless and shameless. The Obama administration, which put the brakes on any new investigations into Bush-Cheney national security malfeasance upon taking office, will sooner or later have to strike back. Once the Bush-Cheney failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran again come home to roost, as they undoubtedly and explosively will, someone will have to remind our amnesia-prone nation who really enabled America’s enemies in the run-up to 9/11 and in its aftermath.
There’s a good reason why Rove’s memoir is titled “Courage and Consequence,” not “Truth or Consequences.” Its spin is so uninhibited that even “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job!” is repackaged with an alibi. The book’s apolitical asides are as untrustworthy as its major events. For all Rove’s self-proclaimed expertise as a student of history, he writes that eight American presidents assumed office “as a result of the assassination or resignation of their predecessor.” (He’s off by only three.) After a peculiar early narrative detour to combat reports of his late adoptive father’s homosexuality, Rove burnishes his family values cred with repeated references to his own happy heterosexual domesticity. This, too, is a smoke screen: Readers learned months before the book was published that his marriage ended in divorce.
Rove’s overall thesis on the misbegotten birth of the Iraq war is a stretch even by his standards. “Would the Iraq war have occurred without W.M.D.?” he writes. “I doubt it.” He claims that Bush would have looked for other ways “to constrain” Saddam Hussein had the intelligence not revealed Iraq’s “unique threat” to America’s security. Even if you buy Rove’s predictable (and easily refuted) claims that the White House neither hyped, manipulated nor cherry-picked the intelligence, his portrait of Bush as an apostle of containment is absurd. And morally offensive in light of the carnage that followed. As Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, said on MSNBC, it’s “not a very comforting thing” to tell the families of the American fallen “that if the intelligence community in the United States, on which we spend about $60 billion a year, hadn’t made this colossal failure, we probably wouldn’t have gone to war.”
Rove and his book are yesterday. Keep America Safe is on the march. Liz Cheney’s crackpot hit squad achieved instant notoriety with its viral video demanding the names of Obama Justice Department officials who had served as pro bono defense lawyers for Guantánamo Bay detainees. The video branded these government lawyers as “the Al Qaeda Seven” and juxtaposed their supposed un-American activities with a photo of Osama bin Laden. As if to underline the McCarthyism implicit in this smear campaign, the Cheney ally Marc Thiessen (one of the two former Bush speechwriters now serving as Washington Post columnists) started spreading these charges on television with a giggly, repressed hysteria uncannily reminiscent of the snide Joe McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn.
This McCarthyism has not advanced nearly so far as the original brand. Among those who have called out Keep America Safe for its indecent impugning of honorable Americans’ patriotism are Kenneth Starr, Lindsey Graham and former Bush administration lawyers in the conservative Federalist Society. When even the relentless pursuer of Monicagate is moved to call a right-wing jihad “out of bounds,” as Starr did in this case, that’s a fairly good indicator that it’s way off in crazyland.
This is hardly the only recent example of Republicans’ distancing themselves from the Cheney mob. The new conservative populist insurgency regards the Bush administration as a skunk at its Tea Parties and has no use for its costly foreign adventures. One principal Tea Party forum, the Freedom Works Web site presided over by Dick Armey, doesn’t even mention national security in a voluminous manifesto on “key issues” as far-flung as Internet taxes and asbestos lawsuit reform. Ron Paul won the straw poll at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference after giving a speech calling the Bush doctrine of “preventive war” a euphemism for “aggressive” and “unconstitutional” war. Paul’s son, Rand, who has said he would not have voted for the Iraq invasion, is leading the polls in Kentucky’s G.O.P. Senate primary and has been endorsed by Sarah Palin.
In this spectrum, the Keep America Safe crowd is a fringe. But it still must be challenged. As we’ve learned the hard way, little fictions, whether about “death panels” or “uranium from Africa,” can grow mighty fast in the 24/7 media echo chamber. Liz Cheney’s unsupportable charges are not quarantined in the Murdoch empire. Her chummy off-camera relationship with a trio of network news stars, reported last week by Joe Hagan in New York magazine, helps explain her rise in the so-called mainstream media. For that matter, Thiessen was challenged more thoroughly in an interview by Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” on Tuesday than he has been by any representative of non-fake television news.
What could yet give some traction to the Keep America Safe revisionism is the backdrop against which it is unfolding: an Iraq election with an uncertain and possibly tumultuous outcome; the escalation of the war in Afghanistan; and an increasingly cavalier Iran. If any of these national security theaters goes south, those in the Rove-Cheney cohort will claim vindication in their campaign to pin their own failings on their successors.
Obama may well make — or is already making — his own mistakes. And he will bear responsibility for them. But they must be seen in the context of the larger narrative that the revisionists are now working so hard to obscure. The most devastating terrorist attack on American soil did happen during Bush’s term, after the White House repeatedly ignored what the former C.I.A. director, George Tenet, called the “blinking red” alarms before 9/11. It was the Bush defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who lost bin Laden in Tora Bora, not the Obama Justice Department appointees vilified by Keep America Safe. It was Bush and Cheney, with the aid of Rove’s propaganda campaign, who promoted sketchy and often suspect intelligence about Saddam’s imminent “mushroom clouds.” The ensuing Iraq war allowed those who did attack us on 9/11 to regroup in Afghanistan and beyond — and emboldened Iran, an adversary with an actual nuclear program.
The Iran piece of the back story doesn’t end there. As The Times reported last weekend, Dick Cheney’s former company, Halliburton, kept doing business with Tehran through foreign subsidies until 2007, even as the Bush administration showered it with $27 billion in federal contracts, including a no-bid contract to restore oil production in Iraq. It was also the Bush administration that courted, lionized and catered to Ahmed Chalabi, the Machiavellian Iraqi who lobbied for the Iraq war, supplied some of the more egregious “intelligence” on Saddam’s W.M.D. used to sell it, and has ever since flaunted his dual loyalty to Iran.
Last month, no less reliable a source than Gen. Ray Odierno, the senior American commander in Iraq, warned that Chalabi was essentially functioning as an open Iranian agent on the eve of Iraq’s election, meeting with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and other Iranian officials to facilitate Iran’s influence over Iraq after the voting. (Dexter Filkins of The Times reported on Chalabi’s ties to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2006.) As the vote counting began last week, fears grew that he could be the monkey wrench who corrupts the entire process. It’s no surprise that Chalabi, so beloved by Bush that he appeared as an honored guest at the 2004 State of the Union, receives not a single mention in Rove’s memoir.
If we are really to keep America safe, it’s essential we remember exactly which American politicians empowered Iran, Al Qaeda and the Taliban from 2001 to 2008, and why. History will be repeated not only if we forget it, but also if we let it be rewritten by those whose ideological zealotry and boneheaded decisions have made America less safe to this day.
</div></div>
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Karl called Me Far Left Liberal Who Has Been Drinking too Much Swamp Water:
by James Moore
Link to Article
When the book "Bush's Brain" was published, my co-author Wayne Slater and I assumed we were done with Karl Rove. We had exercised what we believed was a journalistic responsibility to inform the public about Karl and, of course, made a few dollars selling books. We both had other projects and ideas we wanted to explore.
Karl, though, was influencing much of what was taking place in our country and in the wider world. Interest in him increased. We knew him better than others and felt inclined to write a sequel to our first book. "The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power" will be published in a few weeks by Random House/Crown.
And Karl is not happy.
Mr. Rove does not deign to call me. I am beneath contempt. When FOX News and Brit Hume ran an excerpt of an interview with me in the film based on the original book, <span style='font-size: 20pt'>Rove responded by describing me as a "far left wing liberal who has been drinking too much swamp water."</span> The president's big brain advisor, therefore, calls my co-author when he has a peeve with our work. Last week, Rove called Slater several times to begin his ritual dissembling about information in "The Architect." He wants his lawyer to talk to our publisher's lawyers. He wants to pretend like he has been cooperative and we are obstinate and did not listen to his side of any story. He is, as always, beginning his spin in advance of any public interest the book may generate.
Just as he did with "Bush's Brain," Rove managed to acquire an early galley version of the new book. He is disturbed about several matters but appears most deeply troubled about how the narrative proves he has had a complex relationship with convicted felon Jack Abramoff. Information provided to us for the book by an eyewitness and participant in Rove and Abramoff meetings gives lie to Rove and the White House's claims that Abramoff was barely known by the administration. Karl has always known who has money to spend on politics and how to use those people. Our witness, who also told the same story to federal investigators, details meetings between Rove and Abramoff that show the two were using each other for their own political ends.
After reading the galley, Rove called Slater and denied the meetings ever occurred. He wants us to believe that our source simply made up the events and also lied to federal investigators. Of course, Karl Rove is the same man who claimed he did not speak to reporters about Valerie Plame's identity until her name was published by Robert Novak and he is the same person who told the world Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. I do not believe anything he says nor should anyone in our country. Nonetheless, he wants us to provide him with dates that these meetings allegedly happened so that he can check them against his calendar to see if he was in Kuala Lumpur or Washington. Is there anyone left in America who might believe any document provided by Karl Rove? I will not. Nor will I provide him any material or other information for him to use in the building of his spin.
Karl is pathological and has spent so much of his life distorting the truth that he presently has difficulty discerning the difference between what he believes is real and what actually is true. His goal, obviously, is to be able to tell other journalists and pundits that he tried to cooperate with us and show us that we had bad information. He wants to raise doubt and claim good faith communications. He has done nothing but consistently refuse to speak to us since "Bush's Brain" was published. Regardless, he has called Slater constantly wanting to put his lawyer in touch with our publisher's counsel. Rove is too smart to complain publicly about our book because he knows it will drive attention and possibly sales so he calls Slater and demands to talk off the record so he can file his grievances.
Rove is also upset about information in "The Architect" that explores his family history. Ordinarily, a political reporter will ignore a subject's background when writing about issues being promoted by a particular political operative. Their personal life is not relevant unless it contradicts a public posture on a relevant issue. Rove's zealous approach to promoting the anti-gay marriage amendment, however, prompted curiosity during the course of researching for the book. We will leave it to students of Freud to deconstruct what we discovered through on the record interviews, but it will be clear that Mr. Rove's motivations for promoting anti gay marriage legislation has as much to do with his own background as it does the political utility of motivating the conservative and fundamentalist base for the GOP.
But what I will not leave to Karl Rove is the freedom to frame this story in a way that suits his interests. He has already begun to call his political operatives in Texas and elsewhere to suggest that Slater and I, who have about 70 years of journalistic background between us, have simply resorted to making up material to sell books. We did not, of course. Karl is the expert at creating information to serve a purpose.
And there are thousands of dead Americans and Iraqis whose ghosts bear witness to Rove's ability to lie and spin for political ends.
</div></div>
http://www.neilrogers.com/news/articles/2006081604.html
<span style="color: #000066">I didn't spend a lot of time, searching to see how many other of we distinguished Americans have had the honor of earning the Rove <span style='font-size: 20pt'>Swamp Water </span>vitriol, but it did my heart good, just to know that it is one of his standby, go/to, rages, when he feels naked and exposed, and that I was so honored to be one of the recipients.
I hadn't intended to brag about my good fortune, my honored stamp of distinction, until I signed on and immediately saw, what I knew without reading it, would be a radical RW, skewed reference to this mornings charished event...</span> /forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/laugh.gif /forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/grin.gif