Rove dissembles in Strategery

Drudge is running summaries from Bill Sammon's Strategery this week. Today's has two suspect quotes from Karl Rove that are worth noting.

Here's the first:

Although Memogate was initially expected to harm the president, it ended up backfiring spectacularly on the press.

"The guy that it hurt most was Dan Rather and the executives at CBS," White House strategist Karl Rove said in an interview for STRATEGERY. "It further disgraced a network which is third in ratings and, if you look at the demographics of their consumers, it's like 70 percent Democrat."

However, this Pew poll of news viewers found 16 percent of Americans regularly watch the CBS Evening News, which breaks down into 13 percent of Republicans, 19 percent of Democrats and 17 percent of independents. The only way you get to 70 percent of viewers being Democrats is if Democrats made up 59 percent of the public, which is obviously ridiculous.

In addition, this quote is pure spin:

Rove said Rather and his producer, Mary Mapes, were gunning for the president and trying to help his challenger, Sen. John Kerry, by broadcasting the forged documents in the heat of the presidential campaign.

"From her body language and his body language, their enthusiasm for this story was in large measure fed by the belief that they were playing a constructive and perhaps determinative role in the presidential campaign," Rove said of Mapes and Rather.

So Rove can tell from their body language that Mapes and Rather were trying to help Kerry? If he's a psychic, maybe he should be at the CIA analyzing Bin Laden tapes instead.

Comments

[Branedy]

There are more fundamental questions here,

Are the memo's fake?
Who really would have benefited?
Would they have been published if they were known to be fake?

I believe that they are real, they were only 'revealed' to be fake by bloggers, utilizing information that itself has been largely discounted. I do not believe that they would have been published if they had been known to be fake. Much of the focus has been on the alleged font used in the documents. It is claimed that the fonts are a proportional MS font, the truth is that the font, while proportional existed before MS used it, thus rendering this 'fact' invalid.

But if they were fake, only Bush would have benefited. So if they are fake, they were planted by Rove. There is a long history between Dan Rather and the Bush family.

The so called alternative that Bush and Rove speak about are the GOP paid bloggers that recite the party line. They do not represent 'news' or the truth. If they were really concerned about the useful nature of bloggers, they why are they attempting to portray them a something other than 'journalists'?

[Brainster]

Good catch on the 70% Democrats. I agree that the body language argument is a little silly, but there's little doubt in my mind that Rather and Mapes hoped their story might turn the tide in the election.

Branedy's comment just goes to show how fevered the fantasies of those with BDS can get. He thinks the documents are genuine, but if they're not, they were planted by Rove. He probably believes Mapes' claims that detailed debunkings of the documents were up before the show even ended.