Howard Fineman has a warning for Democrats. Rove is coming to get us. Funny, I thought we were waiting to celebrate his arrest for repeatedly lying to law enforcement officers and grand jurors about his role in destroying the career and cover company of a covert CIA operative working on Iran’s weapons of mass destruction programs.
Turns out, these two things are not mutually exclusive. Rove is a little concerned because his inept and corrupt boss is polling at 31%. But, undaunted by a legacy of failure and corruption, Rove has a plan. It won’t surprise anyone in the Booman Tribune community.
Rather than defend Bush, Rove will seek to rally the Republicans’ conservative grassroots by painting Democrats as the party of tax increases, gay marriage, secularism and military weakness. That’s where the national message money is going to be spent.
Michael Hayden
Let’s take them one at a time. Rove plans to push through votes on extending the unconscionable tax cuts on capital gains and dividends. Rove wants Dems on the record opposing this legislation (going to a vote in the House this afternoon). Then he wants to confuse voters into thinking Dems want to raise income taxes on them. (BTW- we only want to raise income tax rates on people in the highest income brackets). My rebuttal: we don’t want to raise taxes, we want you to go find the $10 billion you lost in Iraq and use it to help people get a college education or much needed medical care.
Rove wants to paint the Democrats as the party of gay marriage and will get Congress to bring up constitutional amendment again this summer. My rebuttal: why are you pushing for a change in our sacred constitution that even the Vice-President and his gay daughter oppose?
Rove wants to paint the Democrats as hostile to Christianity. My rebuttal (from Luke 18-22):
Why do you call me good? No one is good, except one–God. You know the commandments: ‘Don’t commit adultery,’ ‘Don’t murder,’ ‘Don’t steal,’ ‘Don’t give false testimony,’ ‘Honor your father and your mother.'”
He said, “I have observed all these things from my youth up.”
When Jesus heard these things, he said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell all that you have, and distribute it to the poor. You will have treasure in heaven. Come, follow me.”
But when he heard these things, he became very sad, for he was very rich.Jesus, seeing that he became very sad said, “How hard it is for those who have riches to enter into the Kingdom of God!
Lastly, Rove wants to paint the Democrats as the party of military weakness and is daring us to oppose the nomination of former NSA Director Michael Hayden to be Director of Central Intelligence. This is the big battle. Are we still afraid of this tactic when Bush has a 65% disapproval rating?
My rebuttal: the Democrats didn’t appoint total failures Porter Goss, Donald Rumsfeld, Michael Chertoff, or Michael Brown to head up the agencies in charge of our national security. The Democrats didn’t make a decision to falsify evidence to scare the American people into supporting an invasion of a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and had no weapons of mass destruction. Democrats didn’t tell you to invade with too few troops. We didn’t predict we would be greeted as liberators. We aren’t responsible for the pitiful state of the armed forces. The retired Generals that are demanding that Rumsfeld be fired are not all Democrats. In fact, most of them are Republicans…or used to be before you destroyed the brand by trashing our military. Go ahead and sell off key infrastructure to the highest bidder in the Middle East while telling us you are doing everything you can to protect us. We don’t buy it and the American people don’t buy it. And by the way, real men can protect their families without tapping their phones or opening their mail.
Rove doesn’t scare me. He’s going to jail. Bring on Fitzmas, and bring on Rove’s stupid campaign strategy. Any Democrat that runs scared this year, deserves to lose.
