When In Doubt, Lie, Lie Again

Karl Rove is a born liar. It's actually what political professionals like him do for a living. Yet he somehow has achieved this mythic status in the traditional press and parlayed it into some sort of status. He's even writing a column for Newsweek now.

This claim that the Democrats in Congress were responsible for pushing the Iraq War Resolution vote right before the 2002 midterm elections has been completely discredited by everyone, even Rove's associates in the White House like Ari Fleischer and Andy Card. Yet Rove's instinct is to continue with the lie, in the hopes that the media will play it as an "opinions differ" issue instead of a "one guy is lying and everyone else is telling the truth" issue. In this way, Rove DEPENDS on a broken media system to give his lies credibility. Indeed, when the Washington Post reported on the controversy, they shied away from using the word "lie" and depicting Rove as telling obvious falsehoods. So he went ahead and lied again this morning.

On Fox News Sunday this morning, Karl Rove reiterated his false claim that Democrats in Congress — not the Bush administration — forced a war vote prior to the 2002 midterm elections. Despite having being contradicted by former Chief of Staff Andrew Card and former Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, Rove continued to press his make-believe story about how the Iraq war vote occurred.

On the Charlie Rose Show a little over a week ago, Rove said that “the administration was opposed to voting on it in the fall of 2002.” This morning, he changed his tune, saying that it is not true that Bush “was the only person” pushing Congress to vote on the war resolution:

REP. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN (D-MD): Now you’ve tried to suggest, and revise history here, clearly things have not gone right in Iraq, and you have tried to revise history and suggest that the Congress got ahead of the President on the Iraq war resolution.

KARL ROVE: No, that’s not what I said. What I said was that the general conventional wisdom was that the President was the only person pushing the Congress to vote on the war resolution before the November election, and that’s simply not true.

In other eras, people with this kind of unfamiliarity with the truth would simply be drummed out of public life. Even his allies would see him as a liability and would see to it that he was kept in the basement.

This is not such an era.