The Discerning Texan

All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
Friday, June 24, 2005

Rove's master stroke: LIBERAL hysteria and hypocrisy unleashed in one fell swoop

I ask my readers to be patient with me here. I am about to relate a series of FACTS:

On September 12 2001, ONE DAY after Radical Islamists killed 3000+ innocents and brought down the WTC towers, liberal Eli Pariser created a petition, (which appeared on the liberal website MoveOn.Org according to the following chronology of events, taken from the liberal MoveOn website itself):

September 11, 2001-Unprecedented terrorist attacks against the United States send shock waves through the world.
September 12, 2001-Eli writes an email form that allows users to contact members of U.S. Congress in support of a measured response to the attacks.
September 13, 2001-David posts his petition for restraint on his student account at the University of Chicago. [...]

September 14th, 2001-Less than 24 hours after it was posted, the petition already garners almost one thousand [liberal] signatures. [...]
September 19, 2001-9-11peace.org server crashes because too many [liberal] people are trying to access it. [...] David receives a warning from the system administrator that the site will be shut down. With Eli’s help, the moribund petition is transplanted to 9-11peace.org and saved. An article in The [liberal] Chicago Sun-Times features 9-11peace.org and the petition.
September 27, 2001-Peter Schurmann, executive director of MoveOn.org, emails Eli to solicit feedback on MoveOn's "Justice not Terror" petition. Peter and Eli discuss the possibility of a collaboration in which MoveOn's technical systems and political experience would support the work of 9-11peace.


So there you have it: within two weeks of 9/11, the following petition appeared on liberal MoveOn.Org's servers. Thousands of liberals had already signed it. That is the chronology. Now for the petition itself. Note particularly the highlighted portions:

We, the undersigned, citizens and residents of the United States of America and of countries around the world, appeal to the President of The United States, George W. Bush; to the NATO Secretary General, Lord Robertson; to the President of the European Commission, Romano Prodi; and to all leaders internationally to use moderation and restraint in responding to the recent terrorist attacks against the United States. We implore the powers that be to use, wherever possible, international judicial institutions and international human rights law to bring to justice those responsible for the attacks, rather than the instruments of war, violence or destruction.

OK, are you with me so far? We have liberals, thousands of them, immediately after 9/11 calling for the use of restraint, advocating the use of judicial systems rather than war to respond to the attacks. Then we have these quotes, shortly after 9/11 from other liberals (courtesy of Captain Ed):

Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-HI), 10/1/01, Roll Call: "I truly believe if we had a Department of Peace, we could have seen [9/11] coming."
Al Sharpton, 12/1/02,
New York Times, on the 9/11 attacks: "America is beginning to reap what it has sown."
Rep. Marcy Kaptur, 3/1/2003,
Toledo Blade: "One could say that Osama bin Laden and these non-nation-state fighters with religious purpose are very similar to those kind of atypical revolutionaries that helped cast off the British crown."


Fast forward to Karl Rove's speech the other night, as quoted by the New York Times:


"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Mr. Rove, the senior political adviser to President Bush, said at a fund-raiser in Midtown for the Conservative Party of New York State.

Citing calls by progressive groups to respond carefully to the attacks, Mr. Rove said to the applause of several hundred audience members, "I don't know about you, but moderation and restraint is not what I felt when I watched the twin towers crumble to the ground, a side of the Pentagon destroyed, and almost 3,000 of our fellow citizens perish in flames and rubble." ...

Mr. Rove also said American armed forces overseas were in more jeopardy as a result of remarks last week by Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, who compared American mistreatment of detainees to the acts of "Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime - Pol Pot or others."


Still with me? Karl Rove, speaking to a group of conservatives accused liberals (which for some reason every Democrat took offense to...) from early on, of not having the same approach to this War on Terror as have conservatives. In other words, he restated exactly what occurred in September/October of 2001.

So why is it that the left has come completely unhinged over Rove's remarks? You would think Rove was...Dick Durbin or something (which of course is exactly the point, and the reason d'etre). And when I say "unhinged", I am talking about things like this:


"Karl Rove should immediately and fully apologize for his remarks or he should resign," Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said in a statement. "I hope the president will join me in repudiating these remarks."

Apologize for what?? For telling it exactly like it is? For revealing the MoveOn.Org liberals for exactly who and what they were and still are?

And then there was this, which had such heavy irony in it that I found it to be nothing short of hilarious:


Chairman Howard Dean called on Bush to "show some leadership and unequivocally repudiate Rove's divisive and damaging political rhetoric."

Excuse me? Is this Howard "The Scream" Dean talking about divisive rhetoric? I am shocked, shocked....

I thought Captain Ed put it quite well when he said:


Would this be the same Harry Reid who called George Bush a loser and a liar, and later said that he would only retract the "loser" comment? Could this be the same party that has its chairman calling Republicans people who never did an honest day's work in their lives, the party of "unfriendly ... white Christians" and who "hates Republicans and everything they stand for"?

Surely the party that has stood up and demanded civil trials for captured terrorists instead of the military detention they require and bemoaned the loss os sympathy that the world had for us on 9/11 cannot have taken offense at Rove's assertion that "liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."

What we have here, in this demand for a retraction after a season of personal attacks from Howard Dean, Harry Reid, and the entire leadership of the Democratic Party is pusillanimity at its most hypocritical. Talk about dishing it out and not being able to take it! That the party of Harry Truman has descended to this jaw-dropping level of political cowardice and sheer crybaby status boggles the mind.

Small wonder that the American electorate has shut Democrats out of power during this epic period of national security crises. Who would trust these wimps to defend themselves, let alone anyone else?


Karl Rove is a genius. I don't pretend to read his mind, but to elicit this type of reaction from the Democratic Leadership for telling the absolute truth is nothing short of political strategic mastery.

Michelle Malkin has hit it right on the money in her post entitled Dems want to play Rove = Durbin." A losing strategy: it doesn't fly here, and no matter how much bluster the partisans want to try to spin this with, I don't think it is going to fly with the average American voter either. We are witnessing perhaps the biggest bunch of adult crybabies in modern history...and they actually believe that behaving this way is going to cause America to want to allow them to lead this war??? Now THAT is funny.

Captain Ed concludes his post:

Spare me the faux outrage, e-mailers. Look at the links I've provided and tell me how Rove said anything inaccurate. Howard Dean told radio audiences during the primary campaign that he thought it was possible that George Bush conspired with the Saudis to cover up their involvement in the 9/11 attacks -- and you all made him the chairman of your party, so he could continue calling Republicans evil. Ted Kennedy keeps talking about how Bush cooked up the entire war on terror at his Crawford ranch, and no one's asked him to step down. None of you had anything to say when Dick Durbin, the #2 Democrat in the Senate compared Camp X-Ray to Dachau, the gulags, and the Cambodian killing fields. And now Rove's echoing the words of MoveOn, Al Sharpton, Neil Abercrombie, and others to audiences in New York is "despicable"? Pathetic.
DiscerningTexan, 6/24/2005 05:11:00 PM |