ROVE’S SKEWED REALITY…. In his speech on national security this week, President Obama noted that while it might be tempting to “start from scratch” when dealing with the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, that isn’t an option. “We are cleaning up something that is — quite simply — a mess,” Obama said, “a misguided experiment that has left in its wake a flood of legal challenges that my Administration is forced to deal with on a constant basis, and that consumes the time of government officials whose time should be spent on better protecting our country.
This seemed self-evidently true. There’s an argument about whether the president’s preferred method to clean up the mess is a good one, but that the system Bush/Cheney left in place is a legal, political, and practical morass seems uncontroversial.
Karl Rove doesn’t quite see it that way.
“What’s ironic to me is that yesterday he said ‘this is a mess that was left to me by my predecessors.’ No. This is a mess, to the extent that it is a mess, left to him by his friends and allies like Attorney General Eric Holder. Remember, there are DOJ appointees of this president who are in court arguing against the government’s position on these kind of things. I mean, it is his friends and allies and in some instances, his appointees who are in court arguing for an expansion of the rights of the terrorists and arguing for an end to the military commissions.”
Usually, when Rove is spouting nonsense, I can more or less figure out what he’s trying to say. But this is just bizarre. It’s almost as if he couldn’t think of a real answer, so Rove just started making up new attacks off the top of his head.
As Satyam Khanna explained, “It’s unclear what cases Rove is referring to. There has been no litigation on the military commissions since Obama took office in January. The lingering legal mess at Guantanamo, of course, was created by Bush.”
What do you suppose the weather is like in Rove’s reality?
