A troubling bit of info from Andrew Sullivan. We don’t normally run a post from another blog in full but we will here:
Next week, I’m informed via troubled White House sources, will see the full unveiling of Karl Rove’s fall election strategy. He’s intending to line up 9/11 families to accuse McCain, Warner and Graham of delaying justice for the perpetrators of that atrocity, because they want to uphold the ancient judicial traditions of the U.S. military and abide by the Constitution. He will use the families as an argument for legalizing torture, setting up kangaroo courts for military prisoners, and giving war crime impunity for his own aides and cronies.
This is his “Hail Mary” move for November; it’s brutally exploitative of 9/11; it’s pure partisanship; and it’s designed to enable an untrammeled executive. Decent Republicans, Independents and Democrats must do all they can to expose and resist this latest descent into political thuggery. If you need proof that this administration’s first priority is not a humane and effective counter-terror strategy, but a brutal, exploitative path to retaining power at any price, you just got it.
Indeed: the time has come for classic, traditional Republicans who seek to perpetuate conservative values rather than just power or a Cult of Personality to say “enough.” Beginning in the election of 2006 voters may have to take steps to help the GOP clean house of this group of people who have taken it over and who operate so much more differently than Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan — or even the first George Bush.
It’s clear Rove has already lost Democrats — and the recent fury over ABC’s politically-weighted “The Path To 911” was perhaps the final nail in the coffin (it aired accusing former Clinton administraton bigwig Sandy Berger of doing something he never in fact ever did)for gaining more than a pittance of votes from Democratic voters…even moderate ones.
And independents? Many independents have truly had enough of a style of politics that demonizes those who disagree and presses hotbuttons to stir up anger among the electorate to create “us versus them” emotions — so that voters go to the polls to vote against those evil, wimpish, ill-intentioned people on the other side who usually have a “D” in front of their names.
But this time, if Sullivan is correct, they’ll have an “R” in front of their names.
Classic Republicans now have to ask themselves: is this truly the direction you want to see your party move, the values you want to see it defend, and the way in which you want to see it operate?
There is a chance this will backfire. And if Republicans do suffer huge losses in November a good deal of the reason will be because some GOPers remained silent in the face of policies and tactics that probably would have driven them out in the streets demonstrating their opposition if any Democratic administration had done the same thing.
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.