Bush and Rove Blew the Election on Purpose?

By Greg Mitchell
Created Nov 14 2006 - 10:50am

He might have been kidding, but the more you read and think about it, the
more it provides a plausible explanation for the wholesale White House
bungling in the closing weeks of this year's campaign: Bush and Rove blew
the midterms on purpose. How else to accept that the normally hapless
Democrats not only won, but as the president put it, "thumped"?

Okay, even reporter/blogger Will Bunch of The Philadelphia Daily News, who
concocted the idea [1] -- likening it to "The Producers" plot to engineer a
flop -- revealed that he had to put on his tin-foil hat first. I admit, I
still don't believe it.

But the alternative view is just as chilling: that many, if not most, of our
Washington-based pundits are even more out of it than we'd guessed. How else
to explain their embrace of Karl Rove-as-tactical-genius for all these
years? Either they were embarrassingly wrong or ... as Bunch hints ... maybe
all too correct?

Why blow the election? Go to Bunch's blog for the full explanation, but it
largely boils down to Iraq -- and the opportunity to make this a bipartisan
problem as the catastrophe worsens in the months ahead.

That desire, at least, is not farfetched, even if the conspiracy theory
itself is a joke. I'm reminded of a Mike Peters editorial cartoon this week
that offered a new twist on Colin Powell's "Pottery Barn" principle: It
showed a broken pot, labeled Iraq, with Bush pointing to a Democratic donkey
and saying, "I broke it ... you own it."

Anyway, throw down a couple of tequila shots, and then, for fun and a little
head-spinning, consider Bunch's evidence for his provocative conspiracy
scenario. He even asks: Why were the exit polls correct this time? Surely
that proves ... something.

-- Why didn't Bush fire Rumsfeld sooner (as members of his own party are now
howling)? And, just as bad, endorse him on the eve of the election, a move
certain to cost his party many seats in the House?

-- Why did he allow Cheney, again on the eve of the election, to say that
not only was it still stay-the-course in Iraq, it was, in fact, "full speed
ahead?"

-- Why was there no true October or November surprise? Was the conspiracy to
lose the election the true "surprise?"

-- Given Bush's unpopularity, why was he sent to campaign in places where he
did more harm than good and, as Bunch asks, "why did the White House
suddenly make the president more visible by having more press conferences --
and thus taking more hostile questions on Iraq and other unpleasant
subjects -- than at any other time in his six-year presidency?"

-- Why, surprisingly, did incumbents Conrad Burns and George Allen fail to
ask for recounts when they lost narrow races -- throwing the Senate to the
Democrats without a whimper?

-- Why did Rove toss resources into hopeless Senate races in such blue
states as New Jersey and Pennsylvania while allowing Montana and Virginia to
slip away?

-- Why did Bush's Justice Dept. go after vulnerable Rep. Curt Weldon in the
final weeks -- and how is it that a Republican source first leaked the Rep.
Mark Foley scandal? The GOP lost both seats, of course.

I would add two more suspicious occurences: Why did so many conservative
commentators, such as Joe Scarborough, say near the end that the Republicans
"deserved" to lose power? And what happened to the Diebold vote-counting
fears? Maybe Rove did "fix" the election -- but in the Democrats' direction,
so that's why they have stopped complaining about Diebold. As Ann Coulter
put it, "History was made this week! For the first time in four election
cycles, Democrats are not attacking the Diebold Corp. the day after the
election."

Maybe the smoking gun in this conspiracy will be a memo from Rove to George
Allen suggesting that he utter the word "macaca" whenever some dark-skinned
ethnic ticks him off. Or a Ken Mehlman note to Tony Snow urging that he
refer to the Mark Foley scandal as nothing but a bunch of "naughty e-mails."

Will Bunch concludes his blog post today [2]: "Is Karl Rove not the evil
genius we all thought he was, or is he brilliant beyond the reckoning power
of us mere mortals? Whatever the strategery, the more we look at it, the
more we think that Bush's difficult next two years may work out slightly
better for him with a Democratic Congress."

Preposterous, I know. I'm still not buying it. The more likely explanation:
Even evil "geniuses" screw up -- if they were "geniuses" to start with. And,
as I've been saying for three years, the public hates the war far more than
the pundits and newspaper editorialists admit. Americans want out. And no
one should need a tin hat to see that.
_______



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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles.  It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt.  But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson