Rove, Rove, Rove Your Boat

A visit to The Whiskey Bar, and Billmon has this to say:

In other words, nearly 60% of the American people are now willing to say, flat out, that they oppose the war in Iraq. That's a remarkable statement. I'm not sure 60%ever opposed the war in Vietnam, even after it had been lost. You don't turn those kind of numbers around with PR spin -- the casualty lists now speak louder than the microphone, even one as powerful as the White House's.

Add to that the prospect of still higher gas prices, unfilled (and probably unfillable) economic expectations and the black ring of scandal widening around the DeLay-Abramoff-Reed-Norquist axis of weevils, and it's clear that recycled Reaganite optimism -- the "morning in America" brand of propaganda --isn't going to cut it.

So Rove is falling back on his classic strategy of rallying the base. What's more, he's mainlining it a much rawer and more savage version of the conservative message than the White House usually permits itself. While the customary surrogates -- Fox News, Rush, the blogger hyena pack -- have snarled and snapped, the results apparently have been found wanting. Now Bush's "brain" is stepping into the ring himself.

But, like fellow psychopath Mike Tyson, Rove isn't just telegraphing his punches, he's also displaying the depths of his fear. The rhetorical ear chewing and head butting is a clear sign the champ doesn't have the juice any more, and knows it. Rove is trying to get by on sheer intimidation. He's pushing as many primordial conservative buttons as he can -- leaning on them, in fact -- in hopes he can once again make the dreaded liberals the story, not the march of folly currently sinking into the Iraqi quicksands.

All along, the bedrock of Rove's political "philosophy" has been the conviction that propaganda will always trump reality -- as long as the desired message is consistent with existing popular myths and prejudices. And his preferred tool for meshing the two has always been the conservative base and the enormous gravitational pull it exerts on the weak-minded middle.