The poisonous rhetorical legacy of Karl Rove

Rove, as usual, had mischaracterized Durbin's speech, which described how FBI agents who had been at Guantánamo were complaining bitterly about the use of torture. Durbin quoted former Secretary of State Colin Powell disputing the decision to cast aside the Geneva Conventions and to treat the detainees as having no rights whatsoever. After quoting an FBI agent's description of the torture practiced on the prisoners, Durbin observed:

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners. It is not too late. I hope we will learn from history. I hope we will change course.

Durbin did not propose therapy for the Guantánamo detainees, but he did insist that they be treated in accordance with U.S. treaty obligations and some sort of rule of law. His stance has largely been backed by U.S. courts.

In short, everything Rove alleged in his speech to the New York Conservative Party was a falsehood. How did Rove respond to Wallace's questions about the speech? He said that he had only been talking about "four specific things," including MoveOn.org, Durbin and (unspecified) comments of Howard Dean and Michael Moore. But he had not talked only about those four things. He had been slamming "liberals" in general, with the implication that they were the Democratic Party, and had grossly mischaracterized their beliefs.

In fact, Rove's string of slanders against Durbin and the Democrats exemplified his years of service to the Bush White House, and his very career. Rove's earliest political acts were dirty tricks. In 1970, not yet 20 years old, he sneaked into the office of a Democratic candidate, stole campaign letterhead and sent out forged fliers intended to attract the wrong elements to one of the Democrats' rallies. At the height of the Watergate scandal, he discussed dirty campaign techniques with other Young Republicans, advocating going through opponents' garbage. For Rove, politics is not about principle. It is about winning, and making as sure as possible that you always win. The various scandals in which he has been involved, including firing U.S. attorneys and the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame, were designed to make sure Republicans won elections.

What is truly striking about Rove's appearances on all the Sunday interview shows was the reminder of how unprepossessing this advocate of torture, scorched-earth warfare and carpet bombing is in person. He once said of his high school days, "I was the complete nerd. I had the briefcase. I had the pocket protector. I wore Hush Puppies when they were not cool. I was the thin, scrawny little guy. I was definitely uncool."

The modern GOP, by contrast, is meant to be the party of resolute action, not pensive, doughy geeks. Does Rove hide the disjuncture between his lack of physical presence and the overt, almost comic machismo of the Republican Party by his single-minded loyalty to a great leader? Rove himself describes his first meeting with George W. Bush as an instant political crush: "Charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket ... wow." Does Rove overcompensate for his frailty with a savage commitment to violence and to humiliating and destroying his opponents? If so, he would not be the first specialist in propaganda of whom this has been suggested.

Joseph Goebbels, the campaign advisor for Adolf Hitler and the inventor of many of the techniques that Rove later honed, was a similar breed of nerd. The culture of the German far right was violent and anti-intellectual, which posed a challenge to a scrawny pseudo-intellectual like Goebbels. He struggled to fit in. As historian Joachim Fest wrote:

This was the source of [Goebbels'] hatred of the intellect, which was a form of self-hatred, his longing to degrade himself, to submerge himself in the ranks of the masses, which ran curiously parallel with his ambition and his tormenting need to distinguish himself. He was incessantly tortured by the fear of being regarded as a "bourgeois intellectual" ... It always seemed as if he were offering blind devotion to make up for his lack of all those characteristics of the racial elite which nature had denied him.

Rove, of course, is no Nazi. But he did continue significant portions of Goebbels' approach to politics, which depended on smear tactics, endlessly repeating lies, blurring distinctions and making sure one's own party always wins.

Now Rove's willingness to mislead the public in the service of war and violence has caused the fortunes of his party to plummet. As Iraq has become a quagmire and Afghanistan threatens to imitate it, history may even view MoveOn.org's misgivings about the latter war with some kindness.

But his most tragic legacy lay in taking something that happened to all Americans, the murderous attacks of Sept. 11, and attempting to turn those calamities into a stick with which to beat his Democratic opponents. In so doing, he desecrated the nearly 3,000 dead for petty factional gains, and wrought enormous injustices on genuine war heroes such as Max Cleland, George McGovern and John Kerry. Long after his permanent Republican majority is forgotten, Rove will be remembered for using his rhetorical gifts to divide instead of unite. As Chris Wallace, of all people, asked, "Was that a mistake?"

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