Friday, November 09, 2012

Karl Rove still wallowing in denial and delusion

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The earth is flat, the sun revolves around the earth, and Romney won Ohio.


Politico:

GOP strategist Karl Rove went on Fox News [yesterday] to argue that President Barack Obama "succeeded by suppressing the vote" -- an argument that directly contradicts the conventional wisdom that Romney failed to appeal to non-white and female voters.

Rove argued that Obama won with a smaller popular vote and a smaller margin of victory than in the 2008 election against Sen. John McCain. Instead of expanding voters, Rove argued, Obama "suppressed the vote" by demonizing former Gov. Mitt Romney and encouraging people not to vote.

"President Obama has become the first president in history to win a second term with a smaller percentage of the vote than he did in the first term," Rove said.

That doesn't mean anything. There's a weak (if improving) economy, which depressed his support, and he won by so much in 2008, and won generally red states like Indiana and North Carolina, that he was bound to win re-election by a smaller margin. But it was still a clear and decisive victory.

As I've written, including in our election night live-blogging post, this is nothing but an attempt (or power play, as Ed Schultz called it) on the part of Republicans, and Rove the sore-loser blowhard in particular, to de-legitimize the president, to suggest that he shouldn't really be president, that he only won, if he really "won" at all, through nefarious means. They spent four years (and more) going after him on his birth certificate, etc., but since all that's been thoroughly debunked, they're going after him on other (equally spurious) grounds -- by alleging a Benghazi cover-up, alleging voter fraud, and now alleging vote suppression.

(Seriously, vote suppression? Obama tried to get people not to vote? Ridiculous. But, then, that sort of thing is straight out of the Rove playbook, and of course Republicans were trying to suppress the vote all across the country and particularly in key swing states like Ohio and Florida. I guess it's just easier to accuse your opponent of doing what you do yourself.)

Basically, their intention is to create a narrative for Obama's second term, one they'll try to hammer home again and again over the next four years. 

It's all bullshit, but it's just what we've come to expect from the likes of Karl Rove. And it's not about to stop.

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1 Comments:

  • Michael Stickings has it right. Karl Rove is a sore loser (and all decent Americans despise a sore loser"). But worse than that, in his usual sleazy, slimy manipulative way, he's now trying to find ways to persuade the public that the President's massive victory is somehow not legitimate, or not a mandate from the American people.It won't work, however. The old tired tricks of Republican deception may still work with a few old, fat, ignorant white male gun nuts; but most of us have seen through them.

    Karl Rove is done. He's wasted hundreds of millions of dollars given to him by billionaires like Sheldon Adelson, from Las Vegas, trying and failing to steal the election for them. Those guys from Las Vegas won't like that. Karl would do well to carefully check the brakes of his care, and then look carefully under his car, before turning the ignition key and driving off.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 12:53 PM  

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