“Self-Awareness Is A Virtue”: Karl Rove Has Taken The Practice Of Projecting One’s Flaws Onto One’s Foes To A Level Of Performance Art
Despite his missteps, Republican strategist Karl Rove still has a weekly column in the Wall Street Journal, and his latest submission is a gem that shines bright.
Most of the 700-word op-ed complains about the Affordable Care Act, but it’s the conclusion that captures a failure of self-awareness that was unintentionally hilarious.
Mr. Obama’s pattern is to act, or fail to act, in a way that will leave his successor with a boatload of troubles. The nation’s public debt was equal to roughly 40% of GDP when Mr. Obama took office. At last year’s end it was 72% of GDP. […]
Then there’s Medicare, whose Hospital Insurance Trust Fund will go bankrupt in 2026. For five years, Mr. Obama has failed to offer a plan to restore Medicare’s fiscal health as he is required by the law establishing Medicare Part D. When Medicare goes belly-up, he will be out of office.
From the record number of Americans on food stamps to the worst labor-force participation rate since the 1970s to rising political polarization to retreating U.S. power overseas and increasing Middle East chaos and violence, Mr. Obama’s successor – Republican or Democratic – will inherit a mess.
So, let me get this straight. Karl Rove, a former deputy of chief of staff in the Bush/Cheney White House, is worried about a president who will leave his successor with high deficits, a weak economy, a divided electorate, and violence in the Middle East.
Did he even read this before submitting it? Did it not occur to him how ironic his complaints might seem, given that his former boss turned a massive surplus into a massive deficit, saw the economy suffer a near-catastrophic crash, and left two disastrous wars for Obama to clean up?
As for the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund, one wonders if Rove realizes that it was Obama, not Bush, who extended the program’s fiscal health?
The larger takeaway, however, is that Karl Rove has taken the practice of projecting one’s flaws onto one’s foes to a level of performance art.
It’s a pattern I started documenting a few years ago, but which Rove somehow manages to add data points to with alarming regularity.
* Rove has tried to buy elections, so he accuses Democrats of trying to buy elections.
* Rove has relied on scare tactics, so he accuses Democrats of relying on scare tactics.
* Rove embraced a permanent campaign, so he accuses Democrats of embracing a “permanent campaign.”
* Rove relied on pre-packaged, organized, controlled, scripted political events, so he accuses Democrats of relying on “pre-packaged, organized, controlled, scripted” political events.
* Rove snubbed news outlets that he considered partisan, so he accuses Democrats of snubbing news outlets that they consider partisan.
* Rove had a habit of burying bad news by releasing it late on Friday afternoons, so he accuses Democrats of burying bad news by releasing it late on Friday afternoons.
But despite all of this, for Rove to complain about a president bequeathing high deficits, a struggling economy, and a mess in the Middle East breaks new ground in failures of self-awareness.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 14, 2014
“Oh, The Irresponsibility”: Karl Rove–Presidents Who Leave Deficits, Bad Economies, And War Are The Worst
Karl Rove is most famous for being architect of one of the worst presidencies in American history and then a Superpac strategist/delusional Romney campaign-night dead-ender. I’m a Rove junkie, and just as a snobbish fan of any popular band must have some obscure album he finds superior to the band’s most popular work, the Rove career function I find most delightful and rewarding is his work as a Wall Street Journal op-ed columnist. This is the medium that truly pulls back the curtain on Rove’s fascinating combination of insularity from facts outside the conservative pseudo-news bubble, delusional optimism, and utter lack of self-awareness. The Journal column is a weekly gift to amateur Rove psychoanalysts everywhere.
Today’s column begins with Rove’s bizarre belief that the health exchanges in Obamacare are a “single-payer” system, reflecting his apparent confusion about what this term means. (The single-payer in a single-payer system is the government, not the insurance companies in the exchanges.) But the main point is the Orwellian proposition that “Mr. Obama’s pattern is to act, or fail to act, in a way that will leave his successor with a boatload of troubles.” What kind of president would bequeath a boatload of troubles to his successor? Oh, the irresponsibility. The first count in Rove’s indictment is the budget deficit, which “was equal to roughly 40% of GDP when Mr. Obama took office. At last year’s end it was 72% of GDP.” One possible cause of this deficit might be the over-trillion-dollar annual deficit, that one George W. Bush handed over when he left office, along with the massive economic collapse.
Rove’s column goes on to express very strong views on the need for fiscal responsibility:
Then there’s Medicare, whose Hospital Insurance Trust Fund will go bankrupt in 2026. For five years, Mr. Obama has failed to offer a plan to restore Medicare’s fiscal health as he is required by the law establishing Medicare Part D. When Medicare goes belly-up, he will be out of office.
The Congressional Budget Office projects the Affordable Care Act will reduce deficits by more than a trillion dollars in its second decade. Yes, the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund is expected to reach insolvency by 2026, but when Bush left office, that projected insolvency date was nine years earlier. Meanwhile, Medicare’s projected spending has fallen by nearly $600 billion since the passage of Obamacare:
You can plausibly argue that these changes, combined with other cuts to long-term deficits, including partial expiration of the Bush tax cuts, don’t go far enough. But Rove is trying to make the case that Obama’s policies made the long-term budget outlook worse, which is false.
You know whose policies made the long-term outlook way, way worse? Yes, of course you do. Literally the entire Bush agenda – tax cuts, new domestic spending, major expansions of the military — was financed by debt. Rove tries to paint Bush as fiscally responsible because Obama has “failed to offer a plan to restore Medicare’s fiscal health as he is required by the law establishing Medicare Part D.”
That sentence is really the best. The point of the column is that Obama is terrible for leaving deficits to his successor. Rove is supporting this charge by citing a law his president passed, that created a major new debt-financed entitlement that Obama inherited. And he’s presenting this as Obama’s irresponsibility because the debt-financed entitlement Bush passed required the next president to come up with a law solving Medicare’s problems. And because Obama has alleviated but not completely solved Medicare’s problems, this shows that Obama has sloughed problems off onto the future. What a slacker, Obama is, sloughing off problems onto his successor rather than solve them as the president who came before him required him by law to do.
This leads us to the most Rove-ian paragraph in the column, and possibly in the entire history of the Rove oeuvre:
From the record number of Americans on food stamps to the worst labor-force participation rate since the 1970s to rising political polarization to retreating U.S. power overseas and increasing Middle East chaos and violence, Mr. Obama’s successor—Republican or Democratic—will inherit a mess.
What kind of president would leave his successor with a bad economy and a violent Middle East?
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, February 14, 2014
“Drifting Towards Another Middle East War?”: Remember What Happened When Democrats Supported An Avoidable War With Iraq
As the White House sharpens its criticism of congressional efforts to short-circuit negotiations with Iran via a new sanctions regime, progressives are slowly waking up and smelling the campfire coffee of another Middle East “war of choice.”
In part because active resistance has been limited, there are an awful lot of Democratic fingerprints on the sanctions legislation, and even more de facto defiance of Obama from Democrats who have fallen silent. Here’s how Greg Sargent sums up the current situation:
The basic storyline in recent days has been that the pro-sanctions-bill side is gaining in numbers, while the anti-sanctions-bill side hasn’t — even though the White House has been lobbying Dems very aggressively to back off on this bill, on the grounds that it could imperil the chances for a historic long-term breakthrough with Iran. As Josh Rogin puts it, “the White House’s warnings have had little effect.”
We’re very close now to the 60 votes it needs to pass. The Dem leadership has no plans to bring it to the floor, but there are other procedural ways proponents could try to force a vote. And if the numbers in favor of the bill continue to mount, it could increase pressure on Harry Reid to move it forward. Yes, the president could veto it if it did pass. But we’re actually not all that far away from a veto-proof majority. And in any case, having such a bill pass and get vetoed by the president is presumably not what most Democrats want to see happen.
At TNR, our own Ryan Cooper looks at Cory Booker’s decision to support sanctions, and concludes he’s just not afraid of the heat he will eventually receive from an awakened Democratic Left.
You will hear some Democrats and even a few Republicans claim they are trying to strengthen the adminstration’s hand in their negotiations, but that’s a shuck. The whole idea is to torpedo the talks because Bibi Netanyahu believes they are aimed at the wrong goal: keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons, as opposed to Bibi’s demand that Iran lose its capability of developing nuclear weapons. If that means war, so be it.
This time around, of course, those in the Democratic Party opposing a drift into war have the White House on their side, and the precedent of what happened when a lot of Democrats supported a similarly avoidable war with Iraq. But if antiwar Democrats don’t start making some real noise, the configuration of forces in Congress will continue to deteriorate, and we could be looking at a war foisted on an unwilling commander-in-chief.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 14, 2014
“The Neocons Are Losing”: Warmongers Are Howling At The Moon
I liked former New Republic writer Dana Milbank’s column this morning about how “Republicans mindlessly oppose Iran Nuclear Deal.” I liked it not just because it was witty, but because its prominence in the Washington Post—and its place when I woke up near the top of its list of the most popular stories—suggests that in this latest fracas over foreign policy, the conventional wisdom, as well as public opinion, is on the side of liberal internationalism rather than neo-conservative war-mongering. That this time it is the Bill Kristols and Ari Fleischers and Marco Rubios who are howling at the moon.
That’s especially important because in this case, there is an underlying truth—an emperor without any clothes, an elephant in the room—that no one in the administration or in the Republican opposition wants to openly acknowledge. It goes something like this: We all want Iran to abandon its quest for nuclear weapons, and we hope that through sanctions and negotiations, and the threat of war, we can achieve that result. But we Americans also know that if negotiations fail, then war may not be a real option. As the debate over intervention in Syria showed, the American public is not eager to go to war in the Middle East when the United States itself is not in danger. The Obama administration would have a hell of a time carrying out its threat. And even if it did, it would have a hell of a time achieving its objective of knocking out Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
So the various politicians and pundits who called for upping the sanctions as the interim deal was being negotiated, and who now denounce the deal as being woefully inadequate are doing a particular disservice. On one level, they are calling for war, which is the only alternative if we don’t pursue diplomacy. But on another level—if you consider the political and strategic difficulty, in this case of war—they are calling for a shutdown of our foreign policy—for the kind of national embarrassment and blow to our global standing from which we were saved in Syria by the Russians. So three cheers for Dana Milbank and for the good sense of the American people and the old foreign policy establishment of the Scowcrofts, Albrights, and Brzezinskis.
By: John B. Judis, The New Republic, November 26, 2013
“With Blood On Their Hands”: Neocons Fail Negotiation 101 Yet Again
If you want to know how the neoconservatives who brought us the Iraq War are reacting to the interim deal to freeze Iran’s nuclear program, the best way is to head over to the website of the Weekly Standard, where you can witness their wailing chagrin that the Obama administration doesn’t share their hunger for yet another Middle East war. All five of the featured articles on the site concern Iran, including editor Bill Kristol’s “No Deal” (illustrated with twinned photos of Bibi Netanyahu and Abraham Lincoln, believe it or not), one titled “Don’t Trust, Can’t Verify,” and “Abject Surrender By the United States” by the always measured John Bolton.
These people would be simply ridiculous if they didn’t already have so much blood on their hands from Iraq, and the idea that anyone would listen to them after what happened a decade ago tells you a lot about how Washington operates. But there is something important to understand in the arguments conservatives are making about Iran. Their essential position is that now that Iran has finally agreed to negotiate, we must “keep the pressure on” by not negotiating until they offer, to use Bolton’s words, an actual abject surrender. We should not just maintain but increase sanctions, to make them understand that they’ll get nothing and like it. The only way to get future concessions from Iran is to maximize their pain now.
You’ll recall how much progress the Bush administration made in getting Iran to pull back its nuclear development with this approach (none). It seems pretty clear that the neocons understand about as much about negotiating as my dog does about delayed gratification. So let me suggest that an easing of sanctions now is exactly what could get them to agree to more concessions at the end of the interim agreement’s period of six months. The reason is that what we’ve done is give the Iranians not only something to gain, but something to lose.
You may be familiar with the theory of loss aversion, which states that we tend to fear losses more than we are eager for gains. The pain of losing ten dollars you have is greater than the pleasure of gaining ten you don’t yet have. According to Daniel Kahneman, who pioneered the theory with his late colleague Amos Tversky, the “loss aversion ratio” in experiments is usually around two to one. For instance, if I offer you a bet in which you’ll lose $100 if you’re wrong, I’ll probably have to offer you $200 if you win in order to induce you to take the bet. Loss aversion has been demonstrated in a large number of experiments in a wide variety of contexts.
But as Bob Dylan said, when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose, which brings us back to Iran. Sanctions have by all accounts had a devastating effect on the Iranian economy. What conservatives would like to offer Iran is continued economic misery, in the hopes that a little more of that will get them to do what we want, i.e. dismantle their nuclear program. But under this new agreement, they’ll get a bit of temporary relief. Money will flow in to their economy, easing some of that misery. It might not be actual prosperity, but things will be better than they are now. The Iranian public will be pleased about the improved economy, likely making the regime feel more politically secure. Then at the end of the agreement’s time frame in six months, the country as a whole and the government in particular will have something to lose. The western powers will be able to say to them: Things are going better for you now. If you don’t take the next step in dismantling the nuclear program, we’ll reimpose the sanctions, and you’ll squander what you’ve gained.
Obviously, there are many other variables at play—the need to save face, the desire to be considered a world power, and so on. But if this agreement gives the Iranians something to lose, it might be just the thing to induce them to give up more later.
Or we could just listen to the neocons and start another war. Because that always works out well.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 26, 2013
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