One interesting part of the Rove defense strategy is its similarity to the approach Rove used during the presidential election: Play to the base. When it was Bush on the campaign trail, that meant ignoring outreach to anyone who wasn’t a Republican, creating a partisan bubble around the president, and rallying the hard-core sycophants. The past couple of days, I think we’re seeing something similar in defending Rove in the Plame scandal.
Consider Robert Luskin’s recent media interviews. After talking to the major dailies last weekend, Luskin has since done two in-depth media interviews. The first was Tuesday, chatting with National Review’s Byron York, in which Luskin told a very conservative audience that the recent mess is Matt Cooper’s fault.
The second interview came yesterday, when Luskin sat down with Sun Myung Moon’s ultra-conservative Washington Times.
When senior Bush adviser Karl Rove uttered the now-famous words “Wilson’s wife” to a Time magazine reporter, the intent was to correct errors being spread by former U.S. diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV, not to unmask his CIA employee wife, Mr. Rove’s attorney told The Washington Times yesterday.
“Karl’s purpose in speaking with Time about this was to discourage them from circulating statements or allegations that were false and soon to be proven false,” Robert Luskin said.
“Wilson had been saying publicly that the vice president was responsible for sending him” to Niger, Mr. Luskin said. “That was false.”
Now, the substance of such a comment is absurd. Wilson never said such a thing. In fact, Luskin has to know what he’s saying is demonstrably false. For that matter, so does the Washington Times and everyone else who knows anything about this scandal.
So why repeat obvious nonsense? Worse, why publish it uncritically? It’s not just that we’re dealing with people who spread falsehoods uncontrollably (though we are); I think the media outlets in these examples matter a lot.
The idea here, it seems to me, is that Rove and his defenders need this a “he said, she said” situation, at least as far as the politics is concerned. If they can disseminate the right talking points to conservatives, by way of Fox News, the Moonie paper, et al, they’ll construct their alternate narrative that makes the base happy. “Reality-based” news simply becomes “the left’s version” of this story.
As this strategy goes, it might work in keeping Republican criticism of Rove to an absolute minimum, at least in the short term. Cognitive dissonance can go a long way with this crowd.