What does Rove's nonsensical description of Obama at the country club say about Republican strategies for the fall?

Quite a bit, actually.

"Even if you never met him, you know this guy," Rove said. "He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."

Most of us have read the quote, and it doesn't even make sense.  

But that's the first clue that there must be strategy behind it.  In fact, Rove's statement makes too little sense not to have an underlying meaning that people are expected to to pick up over time.  

First of all, no one stands against the wall if they have a beautiful date.  Generally, most guys want to show off, they can't help it.  The guys making snide comments are always alone.  And that's the key to seeing this statement's intent.

Of torture, Justice Scalia said yesterday:

"It’s a bad thing to do. But not everything that is bad is unconstitutional."

Outrageous?  Or obvious?

Democrats rely on the Supreme Court because we accept, even expect, poor articulation of liberal ideas, weak legislators, and bad laws.  We have improbably taken the last line of defense, a Supreme Court hearing, and turned it into our often first and only defense against bad ideas.

This transformation of the court's importance is entirely the fault of us liberals:  by relying too long on this last line of defense, we have lost the ability to pass good laws in the first place.  We focus hard on confirmations and on individual cases because we lost our arguments in the public sphere.  This feeds into Republican stereotyping of Democrats as out-of-touch or elitist, and allows them to paint good judges as 'activist.'

Rep. Kingston-- caught your appearance on Bill Maher.

"We're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here."

We've all heard that argument, and most sane people dismiss it just another justification, presented by an Administration clutching for a believable story.  The President himself has even continued to make this point recently.  

I've decided to go out on a limb and cynically accept that the Administration believes this.  Now that I've done that, the Administration's bluster makes a perverse sort of logical sense, and may even become predictable.  It is only cognitive dissonance that kept me from seeing it.

In fact, this is the only logical and believable Administration argument, for while it means that the war must go on forever for us to "win", it also means we are now "winning" in Iraq.

Reading Daivid Niewert's excellent recent entry, Projecting fascism, http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/... I was reminded that this is not the first time that Republicans have deliberately and relentlessly projected their own failings onto Democrats.   I encourage you to read it if you haven't already.

Projection of the GOP's own failings onto opponents has been a very successful tactic for quite some time.  There have been many strong variants of this and "fascist" is only the latest.  While this may not have the effect of totally demonizing the GOP's opposition, it is not intended to.  It works for its purpose of taking attention away from Republican failings first, before a legitimate attack is made.

Here are a few easy examples:

The main right-wing argument claiming that the Geneva Conventions don't apply to terrorists,  suggests that before they were enacted, that the American government had no qualms about executions, torture, or lifetime imprisonments.

I had always believed that those treaties were signed mainly to keep other nations to our own standards, not something forced upon us by more-civilized nations.  With those conventions, we were pledging to treat their captured troops as well as we would treat any other prisoner in our country.

Is this correct, or am I missing an important aspect of our history?  

Soon, even Republicans will be saying that he was.  We must not let them.

Whenever we refer to President Bush as a failure, we ignore the real conservative goals the GOP has accomplished, and they are, in fact, some of the highest goals that party has had for years:  They have cut taxes on the wealthiest individuals in this country, have demolished worker safety rules enforcement, have rendered many federal bureaucracies worthless, set up record profits for big oil by means of a secret energy policy, isolated the US from our natural allies, gutted many environmental regulations, and have slowly chipped away at our civil liberties.

They have been successful beyond what many of us thought possible.

And the nation is noticing.