Roving

"If present trends continue, by the end of the century Germany will be a nation with only 40-50 million inhabitants." --Dr. Walter Gross, the head of the Nazi Party's Office of Racial Policy (1934).

For the past few weeks, if you have read the newspaper or turned on the TV or radio, even Progressive Talk 1260, all you've heard about is immigration.   People have been entering the United States legally, illegally, and under duress for centuries, but suddenly, one day in 2006, everyone began to notice them.   If you Google the word "immigration," you will now come up with 646,000,000 hits, and I'm positive that just two months ago it would only have been 3.

And everyone has an opinion.   Half of Americans think making immigration tougher should be a "top priority"; seven out of ten Americans say the U.S. admits "too many immigrants"; Americans are "divided" on whether immigrants help the economy;   and a "cheese-steak joint" in Philly has just instituted an "English-only ordering policy."   (My feeling as an English teacher is, why stop there?   Make people order in heroic couplets.)   Note that while the debate began as a discussion of illegal immigration, now Americans are weighing in on whether immigration should be allowed at all.

I have an opinion about immigration, too: I think we should stop talking about it.   I don't know exactly how this controversy got started, but there can only be one reason that it has come to a boil right now: Karl Rove.

For months, it was reported that Rove was being interviewed by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in connection with the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame.   But until the recent announcement that he was not, in fact, going to be indicted, a strange silence about his situation prevailed--the headlines and airwaves, not to mention Congress, were so clogged up with the immigration obsession that there was no room for discussion of Plame's outing or the countless other heinous acts committed by the Bush administration and its henchpeople.

I have avidly followed the Rove story because, among other reasons, my friend Bob had promised to take my husband and me to dinner at the Great Sage, a fantastic vegetarian restaurant in Clarksville, if an indictment came through.   Last month, it was reported on Truthout.org that this had in fact occurred, and I waited eagerly for further news, my mouth watering for the Great Sage's new summer menu --but until the announcement that Rove was apparently in the clear, all I heard was blah blah blah about our border security, our immigration laws, and whether millions of people who have become part of the fabric of our society should be allowed to remain here.

Ironically, last time I checked, it was the Republicans who were encouraging immigration, since a non-union, underpaid workforce enables companies to outsource jobs without having to leave the country.   I seem to recall that a large number of immigrants from Central America arrived here in the 1980s because they had some kind of affiliation with the Republicans' own Contras.   Other people sought asylum here because their countries were awash with death squads trained by the U.S. Army School of the Americas.   In other words, it seems incredibly disingenuous to encourage or even cause wave after wave of immigration, legal or illegal, and then to suddenly start wringing one's hands about it.

And it's interesting how one minute, Karl Rove is on his way to being, in the words of Joseph Wilson, husband of Valerie Plame, "frogmarched out of the White house in handcuffs," and the next minute the entire country is embroiled in furious discussion of a situation that at best is more chronic than acute, instead of addressing our most serious problems: the war in Iraq, the Bush administration's threats to our civil liberties, its sponsorship of policies that benefit only the rich, its bankrupting of our resources, and its overall dangerous incompetence, just for starters.  

This is how Karl Rove operates: like a rodeo clown, he and his spin-doctors create a show to distract us from the carnage they have wrought.   The Republican message-machine puts out a "talking point" every day or so, and with the rhetorical discipline of the Third Reich, spin-meisters from the White House to Fox News to Rush Limbaugh to the poor, perplexed man in the street say the same thing over and over about whatever it is until everyone starts to believe it.   The immigration argument has grown so convoluted and complex, much like the case of Valerie Plame and indeed, most subjects once they have gone through the blender of the Bush propaganda machine, that most of us can't even follow it.   This is the oft-noted Rove Method: change the subject, confuse everyone, keep the point simple and repeat it endlessly, and when necessary, lie--no one will check the facts until it's too late.

Here is another Rovian tactic, one that has received less scrutiny: let's call it Rovian Projection.   Let's say you are a white collar criminal who has amassed a huge collection of paperclips, easily accessible to investigative officers, were they to obtain a warrant and search your house (oh, wait, they probably don't need warrants any more)--and you are running for office.   What to do?   Accuse your opponent of being a paper clip thief.   That way, if the opponent correctly accuses you of paper-clip theft, you can squawk that they are defensive, petty, and "negative."  

Here's an example from real life: the Swift Boating of John Kerry.   Bush's strategists knew that Kerry's major strength was his war record--and more significantly, Bush's major weakness was that he had joined the National Guard to get out of going to Vietnam and then had gone AWOL from his service in 1972-3.   So how do they attack Kerry?   By projecting Bush's defects onto him, implying that Kerry has falsified his military record and is guilty of cowardice.   Simple.

Here's another interesting example of Rovian Projection: If you've read Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s terrific Rolling Stone article on the 2004 election, you will have to at least admit the possibility that the election was stolen by Republican operatives.   But according to an October 26, 2004, New York Times article, just before the election,   Republicans accused Democrats of various types of voter fraud, including the throwing of eggs at campaign offices.   Now, if you were going to commit massive voter fraud, how would you set things up?   It's brilliant.

In short, if you want to know what the Bush administration and its acolytes are up to, it's a good idea to look at what they are saying about others.   I don't know about you, but I'm pretty nervous about the upcoming Maryland gubernatorial and senatorial elections.   The other day, a clean-cut, perky woman was accosting people in my local Safeway parking lot and asking them to sign a petition.   Seeing my Kerry bumper-sticker, she avoided me, so I went and asked what she was up to.   It turned out that she was collecting signatures for Gov. Ehrlich's petition drive to "scotch" early voting legislation.   What's wrong with early voting? I asked her.   She explained that early voting was not "secure," that the system just wasn't ready for it, and that people should vote only on Election Day, as tradition dictated.   "What if someone can't get to the polls that day?" I asked.   "Voting is our patriotic duty," she said.   I said, "What if someone has a job that they can't take off from without losing a day's wages, and there are huge lines...."   She said that obviously we disagreed, and that was what was great about America.  

By now, it's common knowledge that Karl Rove has been masterminding Michael Steele's campaign for Paul Sarbanes' senate seat.   Knowing what we know about the Rove Method involving both projection and distraction, I would suggest that this scary woman and her creepy petition are an indication that Ehrlich and Steele are planning to steal the election, and are drumming up fears about security to ward off scrutiny.

Because that's how it works.

Meanwhile, the discussion of immigration continues.   I don't know how far back George Bush's blue-blooded family goes, but three out of my four grandparents were not born here.   If my paternal grandparents hadn't come here from Poland, they would very likely have died there during World War II, and I would not be sitting here, writing yet another diatribe about what is happening to our nation.   In fact, if a bunch of immigrants hadn't come here, century after century, there would only be Indian tribes here, and no Walmarts.

And this is just what Karl Rove wants us to obsess about--immigration, pro or con--while he and his ilk continue their heist of the country that once welcomed everyone to its shores.

http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/gross.htm

http://www.publicagenda.org/issues/pcc.cfm?issue_type=immigration

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060608/ap_on_re_us/english_only_cheesesteaks

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/051206Y.shtml

http://www.great-sage.com/

According to SOA Watch, this school was "closed" in 2000 and re-opened in 2001 with a new name ( http://www.soaw.org/new/faq.php ).

http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/ww2era.htm

For a powerful record of this, see the film Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism , by Robert Greenwald (2004); and of course, The Daily Show .

For a light-hearted look at this, check out Yikes McGee's song, "Propagandy": http://yikesmcgee.com/

Plenty of references to this online, but a fun one is: http://www.awolbush.com/ .

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70614FF3F590C758EDDA90994DC404482

"Ehrlich Petition Drive Challenges Early Voting: Governor Seeks Ballot Measure on Overturning Law That's Expected to Boost Democrats' Turnout Edge," Washington Post :

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/18/AR2006041801527.html

No comments have been posted to this article.

Want to post a comment to this article? Click here.