RUSH: After the joint press conference with President Bush and Karl Rove, it’s over, and Bush is making his way to a helicopter or wherever, and Bill Plante of CBS shouts out, ‘If Rove is so smart, how come you lost Congress?’ They can ask whatever they want, but you know, had I been there, had I been in the press corps, you know what I would have said? ‘Hey, Plante, if you’re so smart, how come Katie Couric is doing the CBS Evening News?’ Ingrates. I tell you, this is Rove Derangement Syndrome.
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RUSH: Let’s go to the audio sound bites. Drive-By meanness is over the top on Karl Rove. The vitriol and hatred was just dripping from Drive-By coverage last night. The level of meanness that you will hear in their voices is staggering. We have Terry Moran of ABC, Chris Lehman of Congressional Quarterly — this is a montage coming up — Chris Matthews, Jessica Yellin at CNN, David Wright at ABC, James Moore at PMSNBC, David Gergen, David ‘Rodham’ Gergen, from… Well, he rotates. I guess he’s at TIME now, but he goes from the Kennedy School to Newsweek to CNN to wherever. Jim Axelrod of CBS. Dan Abrams of PMSNBC. They’re all talking here about Karl Rove’s departure.
MORAN : Divisiveness! Anger! Ruthlessness! That’s what you call ‘Rovian politics.’
LEHMAN: The news to most Americans here isn’t so much that Karl Rove is leaving, as that Karl Rove has a family.
MATTHEWS: He was knighting the guy, and he said he was going to take care of this bum.
YELLIN: The dark prince of the Bush administration.
WRIGHT: Many saw his fingerprints in the attack on John McCain’s character; 2004 witnessed a similar sustained attack on John Kerry’s war record
MOORE: There is a certain part of this guy that is pathological.
GERGEN: An evil one who manipulated politics…
AXELROD: Karl Rove is packing his bags …and leaving the party in tatters.
ABRAMS: If Karl Rove had been a professional wrestler, they might have called him The Constitutional Crippler.
RUSH: (laughing) You just have to laugh at this. You get offended and mad at it, but after that, you just have to laugh at it. Chris Lehman is the guy who said, he’s from Congressional Quarterly, ‘The news to most Americans here isn’t so much that Karl Rove is leaving, as that Karl Rove has a family.’ Now, I want to make a point about all this. The only reason these people hate Rove is because he outsmarted them at nearly every turn, and they hate that. You know, power is theirs by birthrate. Rove, in their minds, is the one person that came along and took it away from them and kept it away from them for all these years, and they just despise him. They are the smartest people in the room, and to be outsmarted by rubes like Rove from Texas, and Bush, just offends them all to hell. They’re blaming Rove for the swift boat ‘attacks’ now. They’re blaming Rove for the swift boat ‘attacks’ on Kerry. Nobody ever disproved any of the allegations made by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The problem that the libs have with that is, you don’t dare tell the truth about them.
That’s the violation here. You don’t run commercials about the truth regarding Democrats, John Kerry, or whoever. They are immune from this. You have to understand their attitude. They’re high and they’re exalted. They live on the mountaintop, and they are not to be held accountable, and they are want to be put under scrutiny, certainly not by the opposition, certainly not by conservatives. But the point I want to make here is to show you just how stupid, dumb, uninformed, and forgetful these people are. If Rove was in charge of everything, can we go back to the first month of the Bush presidency in 2001? Does anybody remember the ‘new tone’? Bush came to town determined to end the bickering and partisanship that had been featured in eight years of Clinton. As such, he let Ted Kennedy write the education bill. He went along with a whole bunch of liberal ideas, courted liberals, had them up to the White House. He brought the Kennedy clan up to watch some movie about the Cuban Missile Crisis or some such thing. He just went out of his way.
Do they think Rove was involved in that at all? If they do think Rove was involved in it, do they think it was sincere and genuine, or do you think they were being used? Because I’m hear to tell you that it was sincere, it was genuine. Bush had succeeded in bringing Democrats and Republicans together when he was governor of Texas. He really thought he could do it here — and Rove was with him in Texas — and look what it got him! Look what the new tone got him. Look what joining on immigration got him. Look at the way Rove is being discussed today after all of the levels of ‘outreach.’ George Bush and Karl Rove do not criticize these people publicly at all. They are not partisan. Most of their Bush supporters wish they would, wish they would fight back, wish they would respond to all of these insulting allegations about Bush lying and people dying and ‘Bush is Hitler’ and Bush is dumb and Bush is a loser. He doesn’t talk about the Democrats that way, and neither does Karl Rove. All they did was go out and beat them. All they did was getting Sam Alito and John Roberts on the Supreme Court.
By the way, you can talk about Iraq all you want, but that issue, that Supreme Court and getting rid of the quasi-conservative majority and making sure it doesn’t grow, that’s as much on the minds of people like Chuck ‘Schemer’ as the Iraq war or any other issue is. If they lose the White House again and a Republican president has aim at two or three more Supreme Court nominations, they are dead in the water for a generation or two, at least. Make no mistake about it. Rove and Bush got two guys on the court, Alito and Roberts, but they never talk about the Democrats the way you hear these media people talking about Karl Rove, the way that you hear them talking about George W. Bush. So for them to sit there and say divisiveness, anger, ruthlessness? He was ‘the dark prince’ of the Bush administration? This descends from the hubris and from the elitism and from the arrogance of liberals who believe themselves he above being beaten, of being immune from criticism and so forth. Last night on Nightline Terry Moran interviewed Donna Brazile, and Moran says, ‘Did Rove play dirty?’
BRAZILE: I would say that Karl has gotten away with things that many of us on the Democratic side could never get away with.
MORAN: Like what?
BRAZILE: Well, for example, we couldn’t pit white evangelical Christians against gays. We couldn’t pit gun owners against, you know, blacks — and yet Karl could find a way to pit one group after another.
RUSH: Whoa! Normally I have some respect for Donna Brazile, but this is just absurd, to say that Karl Rove and George W. Bush are divisive — blacks against, what, gun owners? Ladies and gentlemen, page one of the Democrat Party playbook is: Keep people divided, fighting with each other, angry, resenting each other; make sure that there is constant crisis and angst; make sure there is no unity on whatever the issue. Wedge everything. Cause a gap to exist between everything. There’s no desire for unity whatsoever, unless their opponents decide to change their principles and drop their principles and join the Democrats. We’re listening to an alternative universe here. Here’s another one. This is like Mark Halperin. He used to write The Note on ABC’s website. He’s on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He’s also on there with David ‘Rodham’ Gergen. Jim Lehrer asked the question: ‘Is some of the glow gone, Mark? How would you characterize how this man should be remembered?’
HALPERIN: Someone who wanted to bring conservative change and felt that it was more important to win power and try to make conservative change than it was to seek bipartisan compromise.
RUSH: Man, oh, man! I mean, if you’re talking about the Clintons, that’s a brilliant comment. Seek and destroy their enemies is exactly what they do! What is this business of compromise? This guy just makes my point. The clichés that these guys live with! ‘Someone who wanted to bring conservative change, felt that it was more important to win power. More important try to make conservative change than it was to seek bipartisan compromise.’ When a liberal says, ‘It’s important for bipartisan compromise,’ what a liberal means is, ‘You conservatives better drop your principles and agree with us and let us have our way, because your way is conservatism and that stinks and that’s a threat to us and you don’t even really exist. We not even going to give you the time of day. We’re not going to debate you on it because it’s an illegitimate way of thinking. We’re the majority. We’re the smart people. We’re the elites!’ So Rove, yeah, tried to win — not only tried, did. You know what’s funny about this, in addition to everything I have brilliantly laid out, if they think this has been a conservative administration, whew! Can you imagine what they would do if somebody like me showed up or if somebody like Ronald Reagan came back? If they think this administration has been conservative… Rove and these guys went out of their way, as I say, via the ‘new tone,’ to join Democrats in a whole bunch of issues, in a whole bunch of ways.
Do you remember the Medicare part B entitlement, this new prescription drug entitlement for the seasoned citizens? Now, under normal circumstances, the Democrats would love that. ‘Why, that would be great. Why, another government entitlement that we can never change — that it’s always going to get more money, and it goes to the senior citizens, and they vote in big numbers!’ They hated it. They despised it. You know why? Because it wasn’t theirs! They didn’t think they’d be able to get credit for it, and they don’t want conservatives or Republicans getting credit for big government entitlements. Frankly, we conservatives don’t want that kind of thing. I got in a long argument with Tom DeLay about Medicare part B because he insisted that it was not that big of an entitlement, that it brought market forces into prescription prices. He’s right about that, but it was still is a new entitlement. It was still something, under normal circumstances, that Democrats would have loved. So who is it that’s concerned with the welfare of the people and doing right, or who’s obsessed with getting credit and having victory and winning and so forth? They wouldn’t join Bush on anything. Other than on those issues where they were scared not to, and the big one being the Iraq war. Now, Gergen was asked a question by Jim Lehrer. ‘Do you agree with that, David, that all Rove wanted to do, go out there and destroy his enemies?’
GERGEN: There are many, many Americans who feel, ‘Wait a minute, this was not artist of the smear, uh, this is a guy who played politics of destruction. This is a guy who played hardball right from the beginning.’
RUSH: I swear, folks, it’s like when you go read these liberal blogs, these kook fringe Democrat base members, they’re all upset because their elected officials aren’t mean enough. They’re afraid of Bush. They’re not attacking. (Laughs) They ought to be thrilled! If that’s what they really want, if they just want to be bad-mouthing, if they want their elected leaders just to be bad-mouthing the president, my God! They should be happy! They should be euphoric. That’s all the Democrats have been doing.
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RUSH: This is our old buddy Howard Fineman, who was on PMS last night saying this about Rove and Bush.
FINEMAN: In many ways Bush and Rove have won, because as the Democrats are conceding quietly, if not openly, it’s going to be hard to yank all of the troops out of Iraq — and as the Democrats are showing, they’re probably not going to have the guts to abolish George Bush’s tax cuts. So in certain respects, Bush and Rove have won.
RUSH: Certain respects? Who’s been in the White House the last six and a half years? (Laughing.) That’s what eats them.
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RUSH: Get this headline from USA Today: ‘To Democrats, Rove ‘More Dangerous’ Outside the West Wing — Karl Rove may be leaving his roles as hard-nosed strategist and bookish policy expert in the Bush White House, but that doesn’t mean Democrats can rest easy. ‘Karl outside the White House is more dangerous to Democrats than Karl inside the White House,’ said Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, who was Al Gore’s campaign manager. Her view: He’ll have lots more free time now to dream up ways to boost President Bush’s standing, ‘rebrand’ the GOP and conquer the 2008 electoral map.’ Do these guys have it on the brain or what? They are literally, utterly paranoid, obsessed with rage and hatred for Karl Rove, which I’m going to tell you what it all boils down to. That quote from Donna Brazile sums it up for me. They are scared to death of Karl Rove, and they have been for all of these years. When you listen to these people talk about Rove on television, I want you to understand the prism through which they see the man. They are scared to death of him.