The Rove-Is-A-Traitor Meme

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July 16, 2005

The Rove-Is-A-Traitor Meme

By Thomas Lifson

Desperate people say stupid things. Democrats are increasingly desperate, and in increasing numbers have moved from uttering the merely ridiculous to shouting self-destructive rhetoric from their media rooftops.

Karl Rove occupies a unique role in the demonology of fundamentalist Democrats. You know who these FundieDems are. They practice politics as their religion, seeing Republicans not as opponents but as the embodiment of evil, endowed with supernatural abilities to deceive ordinary people in Kansas and elsewhere into voting against their obvious self-interests.

To the FundieDems, President Bush must be stupid. If he were admitted to be a Yale and Harvard-educated student of strategy, a visionary seeking to transform domestic and world politics, they would have to take seriously the arguments he makes and respond on a sober level. The last thing they want is to get bogged down in a discussion of what to do about saving the world from Islamofascism, securing Social Security’s future, or keeping the economy growing at the healthy clip it enjoys courtesy of the tax cuts they vociferously opposed.

It is far simpler to write him off as stupid and beneath contempt. No need to answer idiots.

Making him the pawn of Satan’s Embodiment on Earth, Karl Rove, is even better. It gives them a logical ground on which to regard themselves as virtuous, and supplies all the motivation one could ever need for raising money, and going through the motions of contemporary activism: the endless round of parties, demonstrations, and posting of hate speech in the comment threads of Daily Kos and Democratic Underground.

The news that Karl Rove was somehow involved in revealing the identity of CIA desk jockey and Vanity Fair glam-shot model Valerie Plame really got their juices going. At last Satan’s Spawn has made a fatal misstep.

But in their eagerness to denounce the man they blame for their tragic fate at the polls, they carried projection one step too far: they called him a “traitor.” This is a serious blunder.

Elected Democrat officials so far have kept a hair's breadth between themselves and the T-word, calling only for such code measures as suspending his security clearance. But the FundieDems are bellowing the word. Google lists over 97,000 entries for a search of Karl Rove+traitor.

Outside of the fever swamps of the left, a group which may encompass 15% of the electorate at best, nobody thinks Karl Rove bears allegiance to a foreign power or principality. He may be a Texan, but at least 85% of Americans recognize that Texas is part of America. It is simply not plausible to use the word "traitor" about him. Swing voters absolutely hate such rhetoric.

Dems are very, very sensitive, quite understandably, to the notion that they are not pro-American. In fact, they constantly deny a lack of patriotism, even when nobody is questioning them on it. Psychology teaches us that when people fear their own imperfections, they project them upon others, attributing their own dark impulses to those who alarm them most. Rove’s electoral successes make him the scariest boogieman the Left has seen in decades.

To many, in their eagerness to reassure us (and them) that they are indeed patriots, they raise the same sort of question that occurs to the mind of an observer of someone always proclaiming that he is “not a racist.” Why the need to constantly deny it, when nobody else is raising the issue?

The American public may be inattentive from time-to-time, but they are not stupid. Everyone has the experience of people who project their weaknesses on others.

Most rank-and-file Democrats, like most Americans, are indeed patriotic folks. But there is a group among them which would rather see America face reversals, military, diplomatic, and economic, than see George W. Bush and the GOP get credit for successes. When they eagerly predict disaster, desperately search for and loudly proclaim the slightest evidence of failure, and then deny the existence of success when it stares the public straight in the face, one naturally wonders about what they are rooting for.

When they tells us the whole world is against us, despite the evidence of a genuine coalition working together, and urge us to follow the likes of Jacques Chirac, who self-evidently wish us ill, then they raise uncomfortable questions about themselves.

The Democrat death-spiral continues. The FundieDem cult has taken the initiative, and become the public face of the Party, and Party officials, anxious to keep the donations from them rolling in, dare not confront them. By their failure to upbraid their supporters' excesses, they condemn themselves to minority status.

Thomas Lifson is the editor and publisher of The American Thinker.

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