Karl Rove is offering America a super-sized serving of political cynicism.<\/p>\n
Since the controversy over the targeting of grassroots tea party groups for extra scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service arose, Rove has engaged in the sort of political sleight of hand that could only be practiced in a country where elite media have no skepticism\u2014and no memory.<\/p>\n
Just a few months ago, after the 2012 election, Rove was widely portrayed as having declared war on grassroots conservatives in general and the Tea Party movement in particular. The former White House political czar was frustrated: During the 2010 and 2012 election cycles, Republicans had been positioned to win control of the US Senate. Yet, in each cycle, they fell short after the party\u2019s grassroots activists upended the candidacies of relatively more moderate candidates in Republican primaries. The Tea Party favorites frequently proved to be weaker contenders and\u2014in the cases of candidates such as Delaware\u2019s Christine O\u2019Donnell in 2010 and Indiana\u2019s Richard Mourdock in 2012\u2014were seen as having snatched defeat from the jaws of certain victory.<\/p>\n
Rove had enough of that. So in February of this year he declared his intent to use his gold-plated political operations to police the party. Specifically, the veteran operative who says his hero is \u201cGilded Age\u201d political boss Mark Hanna, declared his intention to \u201cavoid having stupid candidates who can\u2019t win general elections. Who are undisciplined, can\u2019t raise money, aren\u2019t putting together the support necessary to win the general election campaign\u2014because this money is too difficult to raise to be spending it on the behalf of candidates who have little chance winning in the general election.\u201d<\/p>\n
That stirred an outcry from Tea Party activists and their allies:<\/p>\n
Fox News\u2019 Sean Hannity described \u201ca battle between conservatives and the GOP establishment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Conservative talk-radio host Mark Levin asked: \u201cWho made Karl Rove queen for a day.\u201d<\/p>\n
Conservative commentator Erick Erickson said that Rove\u2019s \u201cAmerican Crossroads is creating a new Super PAC to crush conservatives, destroy the tea party, and put a bunch of squishes in Republican leadership positions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Read more: http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/blog\/174414\/peculiar-politics-karl-roves-outrage-over-irs-flap#ixzz2TqV77lSK<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Karl Rove is offering America a super-sized serving of political cynicism. Since the controversy over the targeting of grassroots tea party groups for extra scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service arose, Rove has engaged in the sort of political sleight of hand that could only be practiced in a country where elite media have no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-important-news-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35639"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35640,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35639\/revisions\/35640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}