MEDIA COMPLICITY NEWLY POSTED ARTICLE 3
November 1, 2002
Exposing Karl Rove
by WAYNE MADSEN
He's America 's Joseph Goebbels. As a 21-year old Young Republican in
Texas, Karl Rove not only pimped for Richard Nixon's chief political
dirty tricks strategist Donald Segretti but soon caught the eye of the
incoming Republican National Committee Chairman, George H. W. Bush.
Rove's dirty tricks on behalf of Nixon's 1972 campaign catapulted Rove
onto the national stage. From his Eagle's Nest in the West Wing of the
White House, Rove now directs a formidable political dirty tricks
operation and disinformation mill.
Since his formative political years when he tried to paint World War II
B-24 pilot and hero George McGovern as a left-wing peacenik through his
mid-level career as a planter of disinformation in the media on behalf
of Texas and national GOP candidates to his current role as Dubya's
"Svengali," Rove has practiced the same style of slash and burn politics
as did his Nixonian mentor Segretti. Many of us remember the
Lincolnesque Senator Ed Muskie breaking down in tears during the 1972
campaign over Segretti-planted false stories in a New Hampshire
newspaper that accused Mrs. Muskie of being a heavy smoker, drinker, and
cusser and accused Muskie of uttering a slur in describing New
Hampshire's French Canadian population. Rove's hero also forged letters
on fake Muskie campaign letterhead, disrupted rallies and fundraising
dinners, and spread false stories about the sex lives of candidates.
Segretti's brush also smeared George McGovern, George Wallace, Shirley
Chisholm, and McGovern's first vice presidential choice, Senator Tom
Eagleton. Segretti of course did not go on to a high-level White House
job -- he was sentenced to six months in federal prison for distributing
illegal campaign material.
In many respects, however, the apprentice Rove has far exceeded the
chicanery and evil-mindedness of his mentor Segretti. Rove is a
tech-savvy puppet master for Bush. Take, for example, last June's
discovery of a "lost" CD-ROM in Lafayette Park across from the White
House. Contained on the CD was a PowerPoint presentation given by White
House political director Ken Mehlman to Rove on the strategy for next
Tuesday's off-year election. The slide show showed First Brother Jeb
Bush being vulnerable in Florida . Jeb Bush later joked that the disc was
part of a plot cooked up by him and his brother to make it appear that
he was vulnerable in order to rally an otherwise complacent GOP base in
the Sunshine State . Or was it a joke? Jeb Bush and his political minions
like Katherine Harris have shown us that if anyone thinks what the GOP
has done in Florida is funny they have an incredibly sick sense of
humor.
Rove's own tendency to be sick-minded originates with his mentor
Segretti. The 2000 GOP primary was a chance for Rove to hone his skills
in dirty tricks. His target then was Senator John McCain who appeared to
be within striking distance of Dubya in South Carolina after the
then-GOP maverick's surprise upset victory in New Hampshire . Rove's
operation proceeded to target McCain with false stories: McCain was a
stoolie for his captors in the Hanoi Hilton (this from a lunatic
self-promoting Vietnam "veteran"); McCain fathered a black daughter out
of wedlock (a despicable reference to McCain's adopted Bangladeshi
daughter); Cindy McCain's drug "abuse"; and even McCain's
"homosexuality." In the spirit of Segretti, Rove engineered a victory
for Dubya but at the cost of trashing an honorable man and his family.
Muskie, McGovern, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Hart, Tsongas,
Clinton, Biden, Dole, Perot, and others had all seen the Segretti/Rove
slash and burn tactics before.
And Rove's penchant for fascistic demagoguery and outright lying
continues to this very day. After Paul Wellstone's sons asked that Vice
President Dick Cheney not attend the Minneapolis memorial service for
their father, mother, and sister, the White House explained that the
real reason wasn't the surviving Wellstone family's abhorrence for
Cheney but the fact the family didn't want Cheney's Secret Service
protection to interfere with public access to the service. Of course,
the Rove and Ari Fleischer disinformation machine forgot to take into
account that two attendees, Bill and Hillary Clinton, had their own
Secret Service details. But such is the case with a White House that
takes its lessons from Goebbels and the editorial staff of the old
Soviet News Agency Tass.
Rove's dirty fingerprints could also be seen in the Iowa Senate race
between Tom Harkin and GOP candidate Greg Ganske. A few months ago, a
story was leaked that the Harkin campaign had employed a spy within the
Ganske campaign. To put this in a Rove context, we must go back to the
1986 Texas gubernatorial race in which Rove's candidate Bill Clements
was taking on Democratic Governor Mark White. Just before a debate
between the two candidates, Rove spun the story that his office had been
bugged. No proof. But the insinuation that White's people had carried
out the bugging was reported by the media. In the election, Clements
defeated White. Rove stashed away more political capital into his
already heavy knapsack of ill-gotten IOUs.
During the 2000 presidential campaign, we were obviously treated to more
Rove chicanery when the following Associated Press story hit the wires:
"A woman who worked for a media company that produced ads for President
George W. Bush's campaign was indicted for secretly mailing a videotape
of Bush practicing for a debate to Vice President Al Gore's campaign."
Yes, that videotape, along with a 120-page briefing book, just happened
to turn up in Gore's headquarters as fast as the CD-ROM turned up in
Lafayette Park . The sourcerer Segretti must be very proud of his
apprentice. In 1980, no Republican bemoaned the fact that Jimmy Carter's
debate briefing book was swiped and found its way into the hands of the
Reagan-Bush campaign. In Rove's world, its only an affront when someone
"steals" your own campaign secrets and not when your are on the
receiving end of a heist.
"If you're not with me, you're against me." Bush's binary view of "good
and evil" and "friend and enemy" sits well with the Rove strategy.
Georgia's conservative but libertarian-minded Representative Bob Barr
found out about this in last August's primary when his GOP primary
opponent John Linder began spreading around stories that Barr was "soft
on terrorism." Because Barr was skeptical about a number of aspects of
the Bush-Ashcroft USA PATRIOT Act, he became a target for the Rove
machine. However, it was likely that Barr became a target earlier on
when he supported Steve Forbes against Bush in the 2000 primary. Bush
apparently means to say, "If you've not always been with me, you're
against me." It must have really been a dilemma for Bush and Rove to
have to come to the support of John Sununu, Jr. in the New Hampshire
Senate race. Although Daddy made George W. unceremoniously give the axe
to Sununu's father as White House Chief of Staff during the Bush 41
administration, the man who the junior Sununu defeated in the primary,
Bob Smith, was even more of a problem. He had the temerity to quit the
Republican Party in 2000 and run against Dubya for President. So in
Bushspeak, which is obviously borrowed from Forrest Gump's scripts, "if
you're less with me than the other guy, you're more against me."
Undoubtedly, Rove was also behind the campaign to "get" Georgia
Representative Cynthia McKinney who was the first nationally-known
politician to question what Bush may have known beforehand about 9-11.
She was defeated by a former Republican state judge who had supported
the wacky Alan Keyes for President in 2000. Never mind, McKinney was
"less with Bush" than Keyes, so it was more important to get McKinney
who was "more against" Bush.
In all seriousness, rewarding the GOP on November 5 will only increase
the appetite of Rove to amass more and more power into the White House.
The advent of a Democratic-controlled Senate and House might even begin
to spell the end of the road for Segretti's star pupil. German
opposition figures in the mid-1930s often lamented the fact that they
could have stopped the rise of the Nazis if only they had been more
united in a common front when they had a chance. However, they fell prey
to the media manipulation of Goebbels and fought among themselves more
than they did against the menace from the far right. We Americans also
have an early opportunity to stem an out-of-control and
anti-constitutional regime with the Rasputin-like Rove at the after
steerage helm of our ship of state. That opportunity presents itself
next Tuesday--Election Day.
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and
columnist. He wrote the introduction to Forbidden Truth.
Madsen can be reached at: WMadsen777@aol.com
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