With Mr. Rove having just two weeks to go in the Bush administration, we have to wonder whether he doesn’t somehow feel a little more liberated now to speak out against Democratic candidates. After all, he hasn’t said he’s leaving politics.
Here’s an excerpt from his interview:
Mr. Limbaugh: One of the things about your previous comments about her regarding her reaction or her ad saying that half the country is “invisible” to this administration. I’m going to play the sound bite a moment from now in the next half hour when her portrait was unveiled in the White House. The president was as gracious as anybody could be to both Bill and Hillary Clinton and all of their friends who were in the room, and yet she comes out and does something like this. Politically, what’s amazing to me is he’s not going to be on the ballot and they’re all running against him still.
Mr. Rove: Mmm-hmm. Well, I think it shows a lack of vision. If you really don’t… The fallback position in politics is if you don’t know what you want to be about, and if you don’t know what your vision is, go at somebody else. I think that the American people when they approach a presidential election, are always interested in the future, and particularly at the end of an eight-year presidency they want to know what the next person is going to be doing, and so to my mind… Look, it was so over-the-top that frankly, people, an ordinary cat listening to that on the street is going to say, “Well, wait a minute. That’s not true.” I thought it was also egregious that she, in the same ad, talked about the president of the United States treating our troops in Afghanistan as invisible. I mean, how did she vote on the surge? You know, this is a woman who has been less than supportive of the policies that those men and women who are in the frontlines of the global war on terror fighting. This is like a woman who has opposed the Patriot Act that gave us the tools to defend the homeland. This is a woman who opposes the terrorist surveillance program that allowed us to listen in on the conversations of bad people who are calling into the United States. She opposed the FISA reforms that would allow us to listen into communications and see the communications of international terrorists who are communicating with other international terrorists, even outside the country whose messages simply happened to flow through US telecom networks. You know, again, I’m a little bit surprised that somebody with a record so weak on these things would somehow deign to lecture this president, who is very popular among the military and military families because they see him as a strong commander-in-chief who supports them, loves them, and gives |
