Why is nobody investigating Karl Rove? Why is nobody trying to find out where he gets his apparently endless financial resources?
It was Rove who gave America eight disastrous years of George W. Bush. It was Rove who betrayed CIA agent Valerie Plame. And it is Rove who is behind the voter suppression laws sweeping Republican states in an effort to keep minorities and other Democratic-leaning demographic groups away from the polls.
Consider this excerpt from an article by Craig Unger in Reader Supported News today:
The father of the voter suppression movement, even before 2004, Rove began promoting a state-by-state campaign to require voter identification to stamp out voter fraud – a campaign that may bear fruit for the Republicans this year. In the 2004 election, with the help of Mark Hearne, national counsel to the Bush-Cheney campaign, Rove initiated aggressive efforts to require voter photo IDs and implement tougher registration procedures in the battleground states, particularly Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania all to prevent sneaking into the polls to cast an illicit vote, dead people voting, illegal aliens voting, and the like. According to his law firm’s website, “Hearne traveled to every battleground state and oversaw more than 65 different lawsuits.”
The problem, of course, is that voter fraud, as such, is all but nonexistent and the proposed laws are really designed to restrict voting by Latinos, the elderly, college students, the disabled, and the homeless – all of whom happen to lean Democratic. Accordingly, Democrats have called the GOP campaign Jim Crow 2.0 and Juan Crow.
With the calamitous elections of 2010, extreme right-wing legislatures have mushroomed. And Republicans are using their power to introduce voter suppression laws that could disenfranchise tens of millions of voters and steal another election.
You might get the impression from the media that these tactics are new, but as Unger reminds us:
In 2004, pre-election ‘caging’ tactics, designed to cast doubt on the addresses of registered voters, targeted African-Americans so their registrations could be challenged on Election Day. Flyers and phone calls provided Democrats with misleading information about when and where to vote. Uneven distribution of voting machines ensured that voters in heavily Republican precincts could zip through voting lines while those living in Democratic neighborhoods had to wait up to eleven hours. The use of provisional ballots given to voters whose eligibility is in doubt was restricted, again disenfranchising tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of Democrats.
So it should come as no surprise that Republicans are resorting to these tactics – on steroids – in this election. Governor Rick Scott, for example, is trying to scrub Democrats from Florida’s voter-registration rolls by such devious tactics as targeting Hispanic-sounding names. Because many Hispanic citizens are newly nationalized, they might have a different address on their driver’s licenses from the one on their registration cards.
I’m sure you know that Republicans have a long history of using “dirty tricks” to win elections. And Karl Rove is among the dirtiest tricksters of all time.
I find it terrifying that Rove squats like a giant spider atop a mountain of money from who knows where. With access to this virtually inexhaustible supply of cash, he was able to manipulate the Republican primaries and ensure Mitt Romney’s nomination. Now that Romney has proved himself all but unelectable, Rove is unloading his cornucopia in key Senate races in Ohio, Massachusetts, and other battleground states.
And one of the questions that keep me awake at night is: Where does that money come from?
A Rove super PAC, Crossroads GPS, is ostensibly a nonprofit, nonpolitical “social welfare” organization that does not have to identify its backers, but I understand its contributors include at least one casino operator.
Who is Karl Rove? Really?
Click here to read Unger’s article.
