Karl Rove seems to have fallen into a dangerous trap: he’s starting to believe his own propaganda.
Speaking in a ballroom just a few miles north of ground zero, Karl Rove said the Democratic party did not understand the consequences of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
“Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers,” Rove said Wednesday night. “Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war.” […]
Rove said the Democratic Party made the mistake of calling for “moderation and restraint” after the terrorist attacks.
“Conservatives saw what happened to us on 9/11 and said we will defeat our enemies. Liberals saw what happened to us and said we must understand our enemies.”
Remeber when the president insisted that 9/11 should never be politicized? Rove doesn’t.
Regardless, this kind of rhetoric is probably too disgusting to warrant a serious response, but I’d be remiss if I neglected to mention that Rove, for all his strategic insight, seems to have looked at the post-9/11 world — and gotten everything backwards. The left isn’t the side trying to “understand” evil; the right is.
For months, Bush, congressional Republicans, and conservatives in general have argued that the Middle East has countries that have become terrorist breeding grounds because, according to the right, there’s not enough democracy. People in the region, they argue, too often turn to terrorism because they live in societies that lack outlets for political change. As this argument goes, people grow frustrated and ultimately become violent.
In other words, conservatives believe we can help prevent terrorism by understanding what makes people upset enough to commit terrorist acts. To hear the right tell it, we now desperately need to identify root causes and examine socio-political conditions and their effect on personal behavior. This “understating,” they tell us, will make us safer in the long run.
Oddly, if the left makes this kind of argument, it’s appeasement and namby-pamby, Ivy-league justifications. When the Bush administration makes this argument, it’s a “doctrine” for fighting terror and proof that only conservatives truly appreciate the threat we’re facing.
Indeed, it’s not just foreign policy. When Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) sees sociopaths attacking federal judges, does he see criminals to be defeated? No, he argues from the Senate floor that lunatics are violent because “judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public.”
When it’s politically convenient, the right rationalizes evil. When Karl Rove argues that the left wants to “understand our enemies,” he’s projecting.