Karl Rove, Ever The Dirty Trickster

Karl Rove, just the same as ever:

At another time, the Democratic response might have been to marshal doctors’ records to disprove the false claim. Rivals for the presidential nomination might have joined the chorus of faux-alarm. Nothing like that happened. A Clinton staffer told the New York Post, “Please assure Dr. Rove she’s 100 percent,” adding, “Karl Rove has deceived the country for years, but there are no words for this level of lying.” Boom.

White House press secretary Jay Carney was more brutal still. “Here’s what I would say about cognitive capacity, which is that Dr. Rove might have been the last person in America on election night to recognize and acknowledge that the president had won reelection, including the state of Ohio. So we’ll leave it at that.”

...Note that Rove came armed with dates and details about Clinton’s health woes, along with subtle charges that the former secretary of state is hiding something. (She had a blood clot; “They won’t say where.” Oh wait; they said where the very next day.)

That’s the hallmark of the dirty trickster: introduce just enough fact into the story, larded with lies, to get reporters (he hopes) to begin chasing down the details.

On cue Sean Hannity picked up the cudgel, asking on his show last night, “whoever spends 30 days in the hospital these days?” That’s our Fox; debunking Rove in one segment; spreading his lies in another. No doubt some wag at Politico or National Journal (I won’t venture names; the choices are many) is right now preparing a contrarian “Karl Rove is right.”

Of course, it’s not hard to recall when Republicans were minimizing Clinton’s December 2012 health troubles, calling it “Benghazi flu” to make the also-scurrilous charge that she was using her health to avoid testifying about Benghazi. Now the smear is that those injuries were serious enough to disqualify her as a presidential candidate.

We must remember that Rove began his career as a Republican dirty trickster, coming to national attention during Richard Nixon’s notorious 1972 reelection campaign. As John Amato and Dave Neiwert recount in their book “Off the Cliff,” he was the chief executive of the College Republicans, and he made the Washington Post, in a story headlined, “GOP Party Probes Official as Teacher of Dirty Tricks,” for an investigation into a dirty-campaigning seminar he taught young right-wingers.