Posted on 10/20/2010 12:00:55 PM PDT by Schnucki
Karl Rove was one of President George W. Bush's closest advisers. SPIEGEL spoke with the political analyst about the widespread anger against Barack Obama and the prospects of Tea Party success in the coming midterm elections.
SPIEGEL: In the approaching midterm elections, the Republican Party is putting forward several unusually radical candidates, some of whom are not even "qualified to be a dog catcher," as one Republican said. What has happened with your party?
Rove: That's nothing unusual. In campaigns from both parties, people get nominated who are not typical, particularly in times of rapid change. For example, the Democrats in 1974, at the height of the Vietnam War, had a lot of very kooky candidates that they nominated.
SPIEGEL: Still, it's hard to imagine a major European party featuring a candidate like Christine O'Donnell, the Republican candidate in Delaware. She was forced to admit that she has experimented with witchcraft.
Rove: I know enough about European politics to know you've got a lot of crazy people who make their way onto the ballot.
SPIEGEL: You don't want to admit that O'Donnell isn't exactly a candidate that the Republicans can be proud of?
Rove: In Europe and the United States, you've got different systems to select candidates, and no system is perfect. In Germany you have a parliamentary system in which political parties weed out people. And the fact of the matter is that in Germany, on both sides of the aisle, particularly on the Social Democratic side, you have seen lousy leadership of the political parties that have allowed subpar candidates to emerge through the parliamentary system.
SPIEGEL: In what way?
Rove: You have had candidates that the country rejected in a pretty profound way. Our primary system prevents this from happening as often.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
O’Donnell is antithesis to a one world government requiring the fall of America to socialism.
Of course O’Donnell will be malaigned. It is expected.
...and more telling that that is Europe’s interest in our politics.
I have to be honest here. I don’t give a rats ass about EU politics, but they sure care about ours don’t they.
The other interesting thing is how people who want less government, accountability and fiscal sanity are being called RADICAL.
Mind you Germany is overrun now with unions and Muslim radicals, so calling our normal thinking radical might be in fact radical to them these days.
Rove who?
Rove: That's nothing unusual.
Notice how Rove accepts that insane, socialist assertion in its entirety without the slightest argument?
What a traitor.
Now, now! He was not an employee. He was more of an at-will independent contrator with an "incentive for production" clause in his contract. His contract lasted until some 800,000 Hungarian Jews had been massacred.
But as for employee, color me skeptical. Show me the paystub!! (/sarc)
Rove: “If you look underneath the surface of the Tea Party movement, on the other hand, you will find that it is not sophisticated. It’s not like these people have read the economist Friedrich August von Hayek.”
OK. Show of hands. How many Freepers have read Hayek?
Rove is a moron if he 1. really believes that and 2. if he didn’t think any of use would see that quote.
The Germans are the last who should be beating us up over
kook candidates. I read about a former chancellor elected in 1933 who out-kooked anyone who has ever stood for office here in the US.
...
SPIEGEL: Europeans see Obama as a middle of the road Democrat and don’t understand the unending criticism.
Rove: He probably is a middle of the road social democrat, but remember America does not have a history of social democracy. We have been a country in which even the Democrats have been to the right of the left in Europe, and that’s one of our strengths. A lot of people call him a socialist. I don’t. He is a social democrat, though. He is somebody who says, “Okay, the state will regulate, the state will dictate. We will take an ever larger share of the GDP into the hands of government, and we will dictate to the private sector, but maintain ownership in private hands, subject to the regulatory state.”
SPIEGEL: But is he so different from other Democratic presidents? Take Lyndon B. Johnson. He introduced Medicare.
Rove: Even LBJ in Medicare insisted upon a robust private role. Obama is culturally and philosophically to the left of Johnson.
...
They aren’t getting it. Obama is way to the LEFT of them. Obama is a MARXIST. They still want to see Obama as a European socialist which he is NOT.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2611216/posts
What’s with all the Der Spiegel articles about MAGIC (Obama good) and Witchcraft (O’Donnell bad)???
Flagrant double standard...but they ignore the difference.
Obama’s messianic BS is recent - Christine’s was teenage teasing.
Seems like many of the comments were made before reading the interview.
“Rove is dead to me.”
For the longest time, against flak from all sides, I supported Rove. I held him in high regard. I WAS WRONG.
Suddenly, Rove is dead to me too. He needs to be treated with disgust at every turn. He needs to be treated like the poison he has become.
The little man is going to fall apart after this election.... the other side hates him and we don’t want him.
Again, “Rove is dead to me.”
Screw you, Spiegel. ODonnell wasnt forced to admit anything. How about doing a piece on George Soros, a former employee of your Gestapo?
Yeah.
Maybe they could turn up some interesting info ...
Looks like KARL wants to keep getting invited to the beltway cocktail parties.
As Rhode Island's Roger Sherman wrote during the Constitutional Convention of 1787:
"Representatives ought to return home and mix with the people. By remaining at the seat of government, they would acquire the habits of the place, which might differ from those of their constituents."
We need some good dog catchers in Washington.
Rove: I know enough about European politics to know you’ve got a lot of crazy people who make their way onto the ballot.
I’m glad Rove was able to deliver that well-deserved smack down
Der Spiegel is horrible left-wing and anti-American. I’m surprised they published all of Rove’s comments. He took the reporter to the cleaners.
A Christine win would blow the smear brigade away.
Like Adolf Hitler.
Oh, good. He's only a fascist. Here I was worried he might be a socialist. Oh and that "larger share of the GDP into the hands of government" thing. If you're talking about the auto industry and the banking industry being partially owned by the government, that's socialism. Then again, I'm not very sophisticated. FUKR. Hey, I kind of like how that turns out.
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