Posts Tagged ‘Karl Rove’
She’s Doing It: Candidate Elizabeth Warren Gears Up for Rove Attacks
Her voice raspy from the rigors of perpetual fundraising events that characterize running for U.S. Senate in America today, Harvard law professor and controversial—in a good way—creator of the Consumer Protection Agency Elizabeth Warren addressed an Emily’s List coffee gathering in New York City December 14.
She’s seeking to take the seat back for the Democrats from Republican Scott Brown, who ran as a moderate but has held the party line on most votes since he’s been representing Massachusetts. Symbolically, this would be a big deal, since the woman some have called “a red hot poker in the Republicans’ eyes” would be reclaiming the office held by the late great liberal lion of the Senate, Ted Kennedy, before he died of a brain cancer in 2009…
Read MoreRovian Reality Bites Make My Blood Boil
When I read the New York Times front page story today, showing the extent of Karl Rove’s involvement in the iregular firings in 2006 of a number of U.S. attorneys who weren’t toeing the Rove-Bush line, my blood boiled. Not that this was big news–it was merely a reminder of the many Bush administration abuses of power. I asked my friend, BILL ISRAEL, a former University if Massachusetts Amherst faculty member now at St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, Texas, and the author of the forthcoming book Stealing Reality: the Rise of the Right, the Fracture of News, the Lessons of Karl Rove, to share his thoughts on the matter with me and Heartfeldt readers.
The extent of Karl’s involvement in the purge of U.S. attorneys in the Justice Department is no surprise to anyone who’s known him well. During Watergate, he worked as understudy to Donald Segretti, convicted for performing campaign dirty tricks for Richard Nixon. So I learned a great deal from Karl in the course of teaching “Politics and the Press” with him at the University of Texas at Austin, while he revved up the campaign of George W. Bush to become president.
Unlike Segretti, Karl, to date, has never been convicted. Yet he remains a specialist in wreaking havoc with his opponents, putting deniable distance between himself and responsibility, then arguing that, like Valerie Plame, all opponents are “fair game.” The “hit parade” of his experience in hitting political and other opponents is Chapter 7 of my forthcoming book.
What’s different about the era of Karl, as opposed to the era of Segretti, is that while Karl remains a central coordinator for the political Right, he is also one of its chief beneficiaries. He is among a legion of young conservatives who since the 1960s have been schooled in literally hundreds of right-wing institutions founded since 1935 in a calculated and carefully-coordinated plan to change the ideology of the United States — to push it to the right. The success of that effort accounts for the incredible success of the Right in dominating American politics since the 1970s — and in its efforts to stop health care and health insurance reform now.
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