Karl Rove Battles Monster He Created

Karl Rove-- the GOP's Dr. Frankenstein-- spent years creating a monster many, including myself as recently as 2004, believed would be dominant in American politics for decades. A brave foe know as Reality has been slaying this beast.

Now Rove is working behind-the-scenes to undo his mess. In addition to telling conservatives to stop demagoguing the immigration issue-- Hispanics tend to take it personally when they are scapegoated for all of our nation's problems-- he's also telling them to ease up on the Obama smears-

At a closed door meeting of GOP state executive directors in late January, Rove said the safest way to refer to Obama would be to use his honorific, "Sen. Obama."

"The context was, you're not going to stimatize this guy. You shouldn't underestimate him," one of the executive directors said. Rove said that the use of "Barack Hussein Obama" would perpetuate the notion that Republicans were bigoted and would hurt the party.

Whoa Karl, where would anyone ever get that idea??!

As Markos Moulitsas notes, "It says something when the voice of reason within the GOP on demonizing entire groups of people is Karl Rove. But it doesn't matter. His party is dead-set on its 'hate pretty much everyone' strategy." And he's right.

Andrew Sullivan wrote in March '06 that "you only have to watch O'Reilly or read Powerline or listen to Sean Hannity or David Horowitz to know that the only thing that really gets them fired up any more is loathing of liberals... So watch out for the anti-left hate and hysteria from Republicans. It's coming. It's all they've got left." The Republicans lost big-time that year and refused to learn their lesson. Judging by what we've seen lately, that's not changing anytime soon... no matter how many closed-door meetings Karl Rove has.