Karl Rove: One Fat Straw Man

From today's Greenwald column:

In 2005, the dignified statesman who disdains straw men because they "cheapen" rather than "enrich" the "dialogue of our age" said this:

Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.

There, Rove was respectfully and substantively critiquing the widespread belief among liberals that the way to address the threat from Al-Qaeda was to offer them complimentary therapy sessions so that they could explore their anger issues. If I recall correctly, providing free psychologists to Osama bin Laden and his followers was one of the central planks in the Democratic Party platform, so Rove had not only the right, but the responsibility, to critique that widely held position.

As for Rove's claim that Obama was invoking a blatant "straw man" when Obama decried "a philosophy that says every problem can be solved if only government would step out of the way; that if government were just dismantled, divvied up into tax breaks, and handed out to the wealthiest among us, it would somehow benefit us all": someone should tell Rove about this person called "Grover Norquist" -- unquestionably one of the most influential movement conservatives in the last two decades -- who famously said: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

Based on this one column alone, any decent society that had even the most minimal standards of honesty and dignity for its political discourse would forever shun Karl Rove.