Billmon on Rove

Billmon has been blogging again for a while.  And he has some intriguing thoughts about Rove's hate rant this past Wednesday : Punch Drunk 06/24/05.  An excerpt:

Many on the left have reacted with predictable fury - particularly those Democrats who thought that by surfing the Iraq war along with the Cheney administration, they could buy themselves some protection from such old-fashioned demagoguery, which reads like pages torn from Spiro Agnew's old speeches.

But I actually think Rove's rant should be seen as a somewhat encouraging sign. Rove and his idiot chorus aren't roaring at the top of their lungs to try to drown out the liberals -- that would be absurd overkill, given how effectively the corporate media has ridiculed and/or demonized the likes of Howard Dean and Dick Durbin. No, Rove's hate rally is aimed squarely at suppressing the growing doubts of the great silent majority -- and even, to a certain extent, those of the conservative true believers, some of whom are showing ominous signs of war weariness.

The rhetorical assault on the liberals, in other words, is the core of the PR counteroffensive the White House has been promising to unleash for the past week.

Having been advised by the "moderates" to level with the American people and explain just how badly things have gone off the track in Iraq, and how much time, treasure and blood it will take to redeem Bush's casual promises of victory, the Rovians apparently have decided they can't do it -- not without suffering unacceptable casualties on the home front. American troops, after all, are expendable. But Bush's political capital is both precious and increasingly scarce. Much too scarce, apparently, to waste on an exercise as frivolous as a presidential appeal for patriotic unity and shared sacrifice.

This really does appear to be the rollout of a Nixon-type strategy of trying to scapegoat critics of the Iraq War for the disaster that the President's own actions have created.

Only it's more like the Nixon strategy on steroids.  Or, even more appropriately, the Nixon strategy on OxyContin.