We’ve gotten emails about our posts below (see chain post list under this post) on Karl Rove in which the writers go on and on about how the President’s political strategist was right that Democrats indeed didn’t want to strongly battle terrorism, resisted the invasion of Afghanistan and have such, oh, happy days when they learn that another American soldier has died in the field.
But we continue to caution our many centrist, moderate and Democratic friends that all Republicans do NOT think this way.
There are indeed many thoughtful Republicans and genuine conservatives who are not pleased by Rove’s Amnesty International-like inflamatory comments. We’ll direct you to one Republican view on the great Republican site Red State.Org (on our blogroll under Right Voices) in this post by Josh Trevino.
Read it in full but here’s a small part:
The remarkable thing about the excuse-making for Karl Rove is how intellectually dishonest so much of it is….The excuses fall into two camps: first, that Rove mentioned liberals, not Democrats; second, that Rove is adeptly highlighting a key Republican (though, notably, not conservative!) strength in the public mind,
He goes into more detail, then there’s this:
On a broader point, rhetoric such as this is simply unbecoming to a White House that purportedly seeks to lead the whole of America. While it’s true that pacifist, defeatist leftists such as those at Moveon.org do exist, it’s also true that most self-identified liberals heartily supported the invasion of Afghanistan and the goal — pathetically still unmet after forty-five months — of capturing or killing Osama bin Laden. It is further true that most liberals gave the President the benefit of the doubt in the invasion of Iraq. In this group, I count my wife, a liberal and a Democrat both, and a 9/11 refugee from downtown Manhattan to boot; along with many friends.
And:
So what was the purpose behind Rove’s remark? The hypothesis is that it was calculated, canny, and well-thought-out, with consequences foreseen and prepared-for. But this is to give too much credit to a man whose effect on the party, in unmooring it from conservative principle in so many ways, has been a long-term negative. If we accept the President’s public actions as indicative of Karl Rove’s own convictions, then the latter has tenuous, at best situational claim to the conservative mantle; certainly not where wartime is concerned. He is a smart man, and even a political genius. But this does not impart those qualities to all he does. In this case, we can call his action what it was: the demagoguery of mediocrity.
UPDATE: Tapped reports that Senator Rick Santorum’s office is distancing itself from Rove’s comments as well. He must be a RINO…(Many thanks to Americablog for the tip.)
UPDATE II: Andrew Sullivan:
Rove, in other words, cannot have it both ways. He cannot both use the word liberal to describe everyone who is not a Republican and then, in other contexts, say he means it only for the hard left. Rove is a smart guy. He picked his words carefully. A simple addition of the word “some” would have rendered his comments completely inoffensive. But he left that qualifier out. For a reason. I see no difference between his generalizations and Howard Dean’s unhinged rants about Republicans. Except that Rove is running an administration that is running a vital war. With that kind of power should come a tiny bit more responsibility.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.