Tina Brown thinks she's figured it out

[link|http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51604-2004Apr28.html|How Karl Rove does it?]

Excerpt:

The Republican attack machine -- again -- has made the right calculation: Hit 'em with trivia. Bait the hook with the absurd "issue" of whether it was medals or ribbons that Kerry hurled over the wall when he was a 27-year-old hothead. Then watch the media bite -- they'll do it every time -- and let Kerry rise to it and blow it. Presto, a thrice-wounded, decorated war hero running against a president who went missing from the National Guard is suddenly muddying up his own record on the morning talk shows. Shades of 2000, when Bush jokily bowled oranges down the aisle of his campaign plane while Gore argued about whether he did or didn't say he invented the Internet.

The blueprint for what's happening now is all up there on the screen in the unapologetically partisan documentary "Bush's Brain," about the president's political strategist Karl Rove, which opens at the Tribeca Film Festival next week. It tracks the techniques of Rove from his earliest days running Republican campaigns in Texas, using interviews on camera and off by two Texas journalists, Wayne Slater, senior political writer for the Dallas Morning News, and James Moore, TV reporter and producer.

"When I watch Kerry trying to swat away the issue of ribbons and medals I see Karl as the Oz figure all over again," Slater told me on the phone. "Rove's technique is always to go for a candidate's strength, not his weakness. In Texas, when Bush was running against Governor Ann Richards, her strength was her tolerance, her inclusiveness. She had brought a lot of women and minorities into government. So suddenly in conservative East Texas there was a whispering campaign about why she had hired so many lesbians and homosexuals. It's the same with Kerry. The war record is his strength -- so instead of leaving it alone, Rove just goes right at it."

It's spooky to see it working, both in the polls and anecdotally. In the past 10 days, Democrats in New York have been distracted for the first time from focusing their wrath on Bush to dumping it on Kerry. Even among heavy donors there has been a wave of buyer's remorse.

I say:

Attack the enemy's strength? Don't be silly. That's the worst strategy imaginable. Oh, wait. Forgot who I was talking to. Of course she'll be silly.

What's going on here - in every cited case - is that they're going after a perceived strength, not a real one. There's a Wizard of Oz here, but it's not Karl Rove. He's the one pulling back the curtain.

So how does poor Tina manage to get it so completely backward? Maybe she just needs to get out more. She's part of a clique that have been lying so long they've come to believe their own lies. It's as if the guy behind the curtain has actually deluded himself that he *was* a wizard. And now that he's been unmasked, he still doesn't understand what's going on. It's "spooky."

Or maybe Ms. Brown is just pretending to be this stupid, as some sort of elaborate practical joke. Maybe she's a troll of some sort.

[link|http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/marlowe/#20040429|Home link]

She's part of a clique that have been lying so long they've come to believe their own lies.

Like this, perhaps? The Q is Kerry Lauerman, a salon.com staffer; the A is Tucker Carlson, who is, I gather, a television talking head and a Republican.

Q: What about your profile of George W. Bush in Talk in 1999? That had to be the most damaging profile of him yet written -- swearing like a truck driver, making fun of Karla Faye Tucker's death penalty appeals, mimicking her saying, "Don't kill me!" -- because of its high profile, and because of your access to him. Did that bring you flak from conservatives?

A: Well, it's always disconcerting when something you write is received in a way you don't expect. I have no problem hurting someone's feelings -- obviously, I work on "Crossfire" -- but when you don't expect to, it's disconcerting. As I put in the book, the day before I filed the piece my wife asked, "Aren't people going to think you're sucking up?" And that was my concern, that people would think it's a suck-up piece.

Q: And the response from team Bush?

A: It was very, very hostile. The reaction was: You betrayed us. Well, I was never there as a partisan to begin with.

Then I heard that [on the campaign bus, Bush communications director] Karen Hughes accused me of lying. And so I called Karen and asked her why she was saying this, and she had this almost Orwellian rap that she laid on me about how things she'd heard -- that I watched her hear -- she in fact had never heard, and she'd never heard Bush use profanity ever. It was insane.

I've obviously been lied to a lot by campaign operatives, but the striking thing about the way she lied was she knew I knew she was lying, and she did it anyway. There is no word in English that captures that. It almost crosses over from bravado into mental illness.

They get carried away, consultants do, in the heat of the campaign, they're really invested in this. A lot of times they really like the candidate. That's all conventional. But on some level, you think, there's a hint of recognition that there is reality -- even if they don't recognize reality exists -- there is an objective truth. With Karen you didn't get that sense at all. A lot of people like her. A lot of people I know like her. I'm not one of them.

[link|http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2003/09/13/carlson/index.html|http://www.salon.com...arlson/index.html]

Welcome to IWETHEY!