Reply #4: I posted this in June 2006 & there's not a thing I would change:

[JeffR]

He's an evil genius. He's the poster child for Hard Right political cunning. He's got Democrats by the short hairs and he's preparing to yank them out by the follicles. He's invincible. He's unstoppable. He's Karl Christian Rove, mastermind of the Thousand Year Bushreich.

Well, no.

I don't doubt, in his little piggy heart of hearts, he wishes he were all these things. And I don't doubt that many progressives sincerely believe he is all these things. My take is a little different.

Karl Rove is a mere political strategist. His bag of tricks is as small as his wizened scrotum, and just like that portion of his pigment-free, endomorphic anatomy, it contains only two things.

Fear and smear.

Enough to get the job done, pretty much. With the massive enabling power of the conservative media machinery grinding out screeching symphonies of sycophancy and simpering pseudo-patriotic propaganda twenty-four hours a day, with the pussy-footing and hamfisted miscalculation of elected Democrats (not all, but most) who can't distinguish between "repose" and "oppose", with a huge proportion of the populace still so spooked by September 11 it is willing to have its Constitutional rights pissed on, Rove's handiwork has been so easy to accomplish that any mean-spirited 12-year old could have achieved exactly the same result.

America has spent fifty years lurching around with its right foot caught in a bucket. If you listen closely, the clang-clang-clang of that bucket bumping along the pavement of our "bridge to the 21st Century" sounds like words. Listen: "support the troops", "fight them there so we don't have to fight them here", "they hate us for our freedoms", "love it or leave it", "liberals cut and run", "Heartland", "Homeland", "Democrats are out of touch with mainstream American values", "get a haircut", "my country, right or wrong".

Oh, one more thing to add to the unfortunate genital metaphor above: dangling like a purple dolphin just above his little bag of tricks is the organ with which Rove - like so many similarly-endowed Republican strategists before him - has repeatedly screwed the body politic in every available orifice: cheating.

Minority voter disenfranchisement. Gerrymandered districts. Voting machine misallocation. Phone jamming. Ballot switching. Vote counting manipulation. And, if all else fails, drag an election through the courts, higher and higher until finally, Justices Pubic-Hair and Vaffanculo can tip the balance. Presto: Chauncey Gardiner is now the president. It's mourning in America.

Karl Rove's indictment - or lack thereof - never mattered a whit in the great scheme of things. His continued presence - or lack thereof - doesn't change the political calculus this November one iota.

Any Democratic candidate this year should already know that "fear, smear and cheat" will be the tactics of their Republican opponent. Any Democratic candidate will face the usual hot-button rhetoric, the usual shameless distortion of the truth, the usual Orwellian lexicon, the usual transparent appeals to fear, xenophobia and American exceptionalism. Same old same old. Any Democratic voter should know this too.

This will be so whether Rove is kitted out with an orange jumpsuit or whether his pudge is swaddled in the usual Armani. This will be so if the wrath of God descends on him tomorrow and casts him into the bowels of Hell where he can party at the feet of the Devil with Strom Thurmond and Richard Nixon.

Rove didn't invent the recipe for this little excrement soufflé. It's a traditional Republican dish, to which he added a little Tex-Mex spicing. Let's just say he's a decent cook, but he ain't no master chef.

In short, Karl Christian Rove is irrelevant. This is my first and last comment on him.

There's work to be done taking this country back. See y'all later.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1416436