Karl Rove is Full of Shit

Yes, I understand that the title of this blog is tantamount to exclaiming the profound blueness of the sky or the wet quality of rain. In his position as a political strategist, campaign tactician and all-around evil world domination genius, one would expect Karl Rove to be full of shit.

But Mr. Rove is currently employed by the Wall Street Journal's Editorial page. Relatively recently, the Wall Street Journal was purchased by an equally full of shit neocon lunatic, Australian media titan Rupert Murdoch. Yes, the same Rupert Murdoch who owns Fox News. On the surface, it seems to make sense that Murdoch would re-make the Journal in his own image and hire a first class false counselor like Rove. But not so fast.

When the Bancroft family sold the Journal to Murdoch as part of a merger between Dow Jones and Co. and Murdoch's News Corporation, they had but one stipulation: that the editorial page, helmed by the always restrained Paul Gigot, would retain complete independance. And so it has.

So why does Gigot allow Rove to use his precious pages to masturbate openly about the virtues of George W. Bush? Certainly even the most dedicated supporter of our second shrub president cannot agree with this gem, published this morning:

"Mr. Bush was right to match tax cuts with spending restraint. This is a source of dispute, especially among conservatives, but the record is there to see. Bill Clinton's last budget increased domestic nonsecurity discretionary spending by 16%. Mr. Bush cut that to 6.2% growth in his first budget, 5.5% in his second, 4.3% in his third, 2.2% in his fourth, and then below inflation, on average, since. That isn't the sum total of the fiscal record, of course -- but it's a key part of it."


Spending restraint? Bush spent like a drunken sailor, turning a budget surplus into a record deficit, driving us into debt that our children's children will be paying off most of their lives. Rove pretends that "nondiscretionary domestic" spending is some kind of yardstick of restraint. Let me translate that for you: Bush spend trillions in Iraq in a semi-private military operation so rife with corruption and waste that American taxpayers were blowing $200 on a load of soldier's laundry. But because he CUT the rate of spending growth here at home, on roads, schools and hospitals, we're supposed to belief he was a spendthrift conservative with our fiscal interest at heart? Spare me.

Try this other piece of ridiculous hyperbole:

"Mr. Bush was right to pass No Child Left Behind (NCLB), requiring states to set up tough accountability systems that measure every child's progress at school. As a result, reading and math scores have risen more in the last five years since NCLB than in the prior 28 years.

He was right to stand for a culture of life. And he was right to appoint conservative judges who strictly interpret the Constitution."

No Child Left Behind should have been called the "All Children Driven to Mediocrity." The Act, in short, forces schools to improve standardized test scores each year or face a cut in Title I funding.

Let's play a little hypothetical. Say you're the principle of Ghetto Elementary. Your students aren't scoring to the NCLB standards and you face a crippling funding cut that will make running your school nigh impossible. What do you do? You teach to the test. You focus on strategies to improve student test scores, instead of teaching them the subjects they need to advance to higher education.

And what about the smart kids? The gifted ones, who with proper instruction could grow to be the scientists and professors of tomorrow? Well, they're going to pass the NCLB tests no matter what, so you ignore them. Strategically, you have to ignore them so that you might funnel all of your teaching resources to raising the scores of the underperforming kids who are going to sink the school by failing the test. The smart kids, thus ignored, never get pushed, nor guided, nor inspired to be what society will someday need them to be. By trying to turn the future janitors into something they aren't, you ensure that the future physicians will never become what they should be.

These two examples, along with the dozens of others, illustrate that once Bush has what he thinks is a good idea in his head, no amount of evidence to the contrary can convince him of his mistake, especially after the policy has been implemented.

Paul Gigot already knows this about Bush. An editorial page should represent a range of ideas, but only so long as they are honest opinions, truly held by the author. Gigot shouldn't allow a unethical Bush stroke-boy to write articles that knowingly disregard fact in what was once regarded as the finest editorial page in the world.