Karl Rove

Rove, see, is operating from the outmoded idea that the Republican party should attempt to appeal to anyone not currently already old, angry, and skeptical of the president’s citizenship. From Karl Rove’s perspective, a man universally regarded as an unserious ass should not be hosting a major party’s presidential candidates and then selecting one of them, reality show-style, as his endorsee, live on television. For Rove, the fact that polls show associating with Trump is a net negative even among GOP voters is worrying, and not, as it is for the rest of us, hilarious.

On Fox yesterday, Rove encouraged the RNC to step in and fix this, which is unlikely to happen, because what power does the RNC have over any of these clowns?

“More importantly, what the heck are the Republican candidates doing showing up at a debate [whose moderator] says, ‘I may run for president next year as an Independent’? I think the Republican National [Committee] chairman [Reince Priebus] should step in and say, ‘We strongly discourage every candidate from appearing in a debate moderated by somebody who’s gonna run for president,’ ” he said.

Hah, so Trump is unacceptable because… he might pretend to run for president again, and not because he’s an idiotic unrepentant birther who constantly uses barely veiled racist tropes to criticize the president. Just checking!

Though the day Karl Rove objects to a Republican candidate for attempting to drum up support with bigoted dog-whistles is the day Rove accuses someone else of being incapable of feeling shame.

The point is that while everyone else is out, in glorious free market fashion, solely to make a buck (Trump has a book out! Newt has eight books out!), Rove is interested in the state of the party, and he would like to perhaps help the party to win some elections next year. The problem for him, right now, is that the actual people in his party seem to strongly prefer charlatans to proper candidates. Poor Karl Rove! The permanent Republican majority is basically becoming an angry elderly minority, convinced that it represents 100 percent of the only America that should count. (Which is not to say that this angry minority doesn’t have a good shot at taking both houses of Congress and the White House next year, so Rove should relax and continue raising hundreds of millions of dollars in anonymous money.)

Fox has indulged its audience’s brief surges of affection for unelectable fringe candidates, from Trump through Cain, but the channel’s always been careful to remind the base that they may eventually have to hold their noses and vote for Romney. Karl Rove, who’s already running a shadow campaign against Obama, has made this point explicitly during his Fox appearances.

Romney went from trailing in the Fox News appearances list to getting more uninterrupted airtime over the last week than any other candidate. But Gingrich beat him in minutes the week before. And Newt was just on Hannity last night, where he seemed much more comfortable than Romney did in his earlier sit-down with Bret Baier, a tougher interviewer by any standard.

Watching Fox this morning, clips of Gingrich’s Hannity interview were replayed multiple times. Ron Paul’s devastating anti-Gingrich ad was excerpted for a minute, followed by a clip of Romney sounding like he believed in anthropogenic climate change.

The network seems, in other words, undecided at the moment, or at least willing to see if Gingrich can pull this out without humiliating himself like he always does. The Rovians may yet win the day, but for now Fox seems to be joining the GOP base in convincing itself that Gingrich is electable.

I bet Crossroads is super embarrassed about this awful mistake, right? Of course they are:

Nate Hodson of Crossroads said in defense of the pulled ad, “It was a very small cable system. The four largest broadcast stations in Montana reviewed the facts supporting the ad and will continue airing it.”

He said later, “We are communicating with the cable system and expect that the ad will be back up and running on cable soon.”

At least the ad pitting Bill Clinton against Obama while falsely claiming that Obama wants to raise everyone’s taxes right now is based on deceptively edited quotes! This is just based on fantasy.

The dishonest Crossroads ad attacking Virginia Senate candidate Tim Kaine has a similarly weird blatant lie, claiming Virginia under Kaine ran a “big deficit,” which is not the case. (Virginia slashed spending after the recession made revenues plummet, a move Republicans and deficit hawks everywhere support.)

But because Elizabeth Warren, running for Senate in Massachusetts, represents the greatest threat both to a sitting Republican senator and to the conservative economic message in general, Rove and Crossroads are sparing no expense smearing her. Warren took credit for inspiring the national conversation about economic injustice that led to the Occupy Wall Street protests. Or, in Crossroads’ words, she “sides with extreme left-wing protests” while … ignoring “jobs.” Elizabeth Warren supported protesters doing drugs, even though millions of Americans are out of work! For shame.

Warren, unfazed, launched her campaign with an ad attacking Wall Street, because Americans seriously don’t like Wall Street, but Crossroads spent $560,000 on the “radical redistribution of wealth” ad and plans to spend $150 million altogether defeating Warren.

Rove has, it seems, realized that you don’t even need to base your attack ad on something that actually happened. You don’t need to take something out of context. You can just make up whatever attack you want! Jon Tester voted for spending taxpayer dollars on Magnolia cupcakes for pedophiles. Elizabeth Warren was a member of the Organizing Committee for the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

And the only checks on their lies are mealy-mouthed newspaper fact-checkers and, apparently, cable companies. Otherwise there are no serious downsides or risks to running anonymously funded hundred-million-dollar misinformation campaigns. There are no consequences, no fear of any sort of future professional repercussions for any of the people involved in producing and airing the ads, and really no compelling reason not to lie to destroy a couple of political opponents.

This should be something of a lesson to Democrats, too: You cannot prevent Rove and his allies from accusing you of being a wealth-redistributing tax-hiking Communist radical no matter how “centrist” or “moderate” your voting record, so you may as well vote to redistribute wealth, right?