Some other blog stuff

A Call To Action

"Words cannot express the contempt I feel for Karl Rove and for the chorus of brainless little yappers applauding his recent remarks on liberal reactions to 9/11.

"I'd like to ask Karl and his puppies to stand anywhere in the vicinity of Ground Zero and repeat Karl's fatuous, lying remarks to a crowd of New Yorkers.

"Whole lotta liberals in New York. Whole lotta those liberal New Yorkers lost someone in the towers. Whole lotta liberal New Yorkers who lost someone in the towers might want to break Karl's jaw today. Karl would be well advised to keep his sorry ass out of New York from now on."

Blondesense wonders how this is playing in the military:

"Perhaps Mr. Rove believes all American soldiers are conservatives. When he made his callous remarks about the differences in liberals and conservatives, he failed to exclude the liberal soldier. He also failed to exclude the liberal soldier's family. Mr. Rove made a large mistake because he apparently forgot that liberal soldiers bleed and die in war just like conservative soldiers do. What does the family of the liberal soldier feel when they read that Mr. Rove said, 'Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers,' and 'Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war.'? What does the liberal soldier feel when he reads those words?"

Josh Marshall sees a calculated strategy:

"For Rove, the war on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan have always been nothing more than tools of domestic politics. He speaks for the president and the president speaks for him. So all of that applies to the president too unless and until we hear from him.

"The A-list press folks, especially on TV, are too well trained to call Rove out of bounds. So Dems will have to do it all themselves."

Peter Daou, Salon's blog-watcher, defends himself after criticizing Rove's remarks to the Chicago Tribune:

"I'll keep it simple: I challenge any of those outraged by Durbin to demonstrate that the senator, in his heart of hearts, thinks our troops are Nazis. It's painfully obvious that he was illustrating a point and used a hyperbolic analogy. In Durbin's case the outrage is feigned, and a political tool. It defies common sense to think Durbin actually believes 'all US troops are Nazis.'

"Now the same reasoning doesn't hold true for Rove, who expressed a thought that actually is widely held on the right: that liberals can't or won't defend America. Despite the sheer imbecility of it, many on the right really believe it to be true."

Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters is equally impassioned about Reid and other Democrats demanding that Rove apologize, resign or otherwise debase himself:

"Would this be the same Harry Reid who called George Bush a loser and a liar, and later said that he would only retract the 'loser' comment? Could this be the same party that has its chairman calling Republicans people who never did an honest day's work in their lives, the party of 'unfriendly . . . white Christians' and who 'hates Republicans and everything they stand for'?

"Surely the party that has stood up and demanded civil trials for captured terrorists instead of the military detention they require and bemoaned the loss of sympathy that the world had for us on 9/11 cannot have taken offense at Rove's assertion that 'liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.'

"What we have here, in this demand for a retraction after a season of personal attacks from Howard Dean, Harry Reid, and the entire leadership of the Democratic Party is pusillanimity at its most hypocritical. Talk about dishing it out and not being able to take it! That the party of Harry Truman has descended to this jaw-dropping level of political cowardice and sheer crybaby status boggles the mind."

The New York Post editorial page is in Karl's Korner:

"To judge from the rising Democratic outrage, you'd think presidential counselor Karl Rove came to town Wednesday and compared liberals to Nazis, or Stalin, or Pol Pot.

"Oh, sorry.

"That was Dick Durbin, the second-ranking Democrat in the United States Senate -- slandering U.S. soldiers.

"All Rove did was speak about the comparative attitudes of liberals and conservatives on how best to conduct the War on Terror.

And you know what? He was right. . . . Actually, the Democrats' outrage is understandable -- since they can't defend their own record, better to lash out at the White House."

The other emerging theme is, how bad are things in Iraq? In the LAT, Doyle McManus says Bush is being hit by friendly fire:

"For months, President Bush has struggled to maintain public support for the war in Iraq in the face of periodic setbacks on the battlefield. Now he faces a second front in the battle for public opinion: charges that the administration is not telling the truth about how the war is going. . . .

"But last month, Vice President Dick Cheney broke from the administration's 'message discipline' and declared that the insurgency was in its 'last throes.' The White House has been paying a price ever since. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), who supported the decision to go to war in Iraq, complained that the White House was 'completely disconnected from reality.' Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), another supporter of the war, charged that Bush had opened not just a credibility gap, but a 'credibility chasm.' Even Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld distanced himself from the vice president's words."

Newsweek examines a different kind of gap?

"How, then, to explain the very different versions of reality in Iraq that come out of the mouths of top Bush administration officials and of senior generals on the ground in Iraq? On Memorial Day, Vice President Dick Cheney declared that the Iraq insurgency was in its 'last throes.' Yet last week, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, General Abizaid said that, actually, the insurgency has not grown weaker over the last six months and that the number of foreign terrorists infiltrating Iraq has increased. . . .

"No wonder the American public is confused, unsure what to believe, and that support for the war is down to 42 percent in the latest Gallup poll. What is the reality? And why can't the president and his generals seem to agree?"

You know that conservative guy hired by CPB chief Ken Tomlinson who monitored pro- and anti-Bush guests on Bill Moyers's show "Now"? Frank Rich, checking in with Sen Byron Dorgan, says he had other targets as well:

"Sifting through those pages when we spoke by phone last week, Mr. Dorgan said it wasn't merely Mr. Moyers's show that was monitored but also the programs of Tavis Smiley and NPR's Diane Rehm.

"Their guests were rated either L for liberal or C for conservative, and 'anti-administration' was affixed to any segment raising questions about the Bush presidency. Thus was the conservative Republican Senator Chuck Hagel given the same L as Bill Clinton simply because he expressed doubts about Iraq in a discussion mainly devoted to praising Ronald Reagan. Three of The Washington Post's star beat reporters (none of whom covers the White House or politics or writes opinion pieces) were similarly singled out simply for doing their job as journalists by asking questions about administration policies."

That is pretty chilling.