Leaving no doubt that he once again commands the strategy of the GOP, Karl Rove joined RNC chair Ken Mehlman for the winter meeting to lay out the battle plan for this year's midterm elections. Unsurprisingly, the GOP will push national security as its main theme:

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove offered a biting preview of the 2006 midterm elections yesterday, drawing sharp distinctions with the Democrats over the campaign against terrorism, tax cuts and judicial philosophy, and describing the opposition party as backward-looking and bereft of ideas.

"At the core, we are dealing with two parties that have fundamentally different views on national security," Rove said. "Republicans have a post-9/11 worldview and many Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview. That doesn't make them unpatriotic -- not at all. But it does make them wrong -- deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong." ...

It was four years ago this week when Rove, appearing at another meeting of the RNC, said Republicans would make terrorism a central issue of the 2002 midterm elections. Rove's remarks infuriated Democrats, who protested that, until then, Bush had stressed bipartisanship and national unity in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

And in four years, the Democrats have not learned a damned thing about national security. Four years ago, Rove spoke to the political situation as it was -- highly partisan on the war and Iraq. Far from the rosy picture of bipartisan comity they now paint of the immediate post-9/11 period, Democrats balked at military action in Afghanistan, arguing that the Soviets and the British had both broken armies in that country during the past century. MoveOn protested continuously about the "violence" and predicted a winter disaster on the scale of Napoleon in Russia. Action against Iraq had come into debate by this point and would consume the 2002 election cycle, not to mention the partisan recriminations flying all over Washington over the success of the 9/11 attacks.

Four years later, the Democrats still argue for withdrawal and isolationism. Their only coherent strategy offered is a "strategic redeployment of troops over an event horizon", which translates to "retreat until we're out of sight of the battlefield". And that's just on offense. For national defense, the Democrats want to impeach the President for conducting surveillance on international communications on people identified by evidence and intel as terrorists, including the common-sense tracking of such calls into and out of the US to identify potential terrorist cells before they strike here. Their leadership knew of this program and all its implications since the month after 9/11 and have been continuously briefed ever since, and not one of those briefed have called for an end to the NSA program -- not one.

Democrats have one strategy, and it boils down to I Hate George. Rove and Mehlman simply want to show America that on national security, they have some 'splainin' to do.

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry is