....LMB: "(Mud) Slings and (Bullshit) Arrows"....

April 27, 2004

Man, I am really getting pissed at the Republican smear machine. Well, let me focus. I hate Republican smear monger Karen Hughes.

Hughes is a long-time employee of President W, going back to the days when he was just Governor W, and even before that. Hughes was W's top aide in the White House, before quitting to spend more time with her family. But now she's back to help with W's election campaign.

Before getting into the specifics of why I hate Karen, let's examine this anecdote about Hughes from smirky conservative Tucker Carlson. Me and Tucker aren't likely to agree on much, but this seems pretty nail-on-the-headish:

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.

(emphasis mine)

Wow. Lying to someone's face even when they know that you know they're lying. And she's one of Bush's key spokespeople.

It's gonna be a long campaign.

I haven't had too much exposure to Hughes, but her style seems to be one of plain-spoken rhetoric that deliberately confuses, distorts, and makes erroneous connections between non-related things. For example, the first time I heard her speak for the 2004 Bush campaign was on NPR about a month ago, in a small pickup truck as a parking lot security guard tried to help me find my stolen car. Hughes was talking about the recent testimony of Richard Clarke. Hughes said something to the effect of "it's really unfortunate that Richard Clarke is giving the appearance that America is to blame for 9/11, when the only people responsible for the attacks are Al Qaeda."

She massively distorted Clarke's message (obviously with full knowledge that he did not say anything close to what she claimed he said) so that she could take the only real rebuttal ("Bush is not incompetent") into an innapropriate, but much more powerful one ("Al Qaeda is bad").

When I heard her say this, for a few seconds, it seemed to me that finding my missing car was nowhere near as important as convincing the elderly Jamaican security guard next to me that Karen Hughes was a miserable lying bitch. But that feeling faded as we continued to search for the car that was already being joyridden miles away.

The next smear I heard from Hughes highlighted another aspect of her strategy: phrasing things in terms of vague anxiety: "it is unfortunate that...", "it find it distressing that...", "I am very troubled by..." This way, she doesn't have to actually explain her smears, all she needs to say is that Rumor X about Politician Y causes her discomfort in some way.

Like when she says that "I remember watching Senator Kerry, back when he was against the [Vietnam] war, when he came home, and I was very troubled by the kind of allegations that he hurled against his fellow veterans..."

First of all, I don't believe her. I don't believe that she actually remembers seeing Kerry speak out in the early 1970s. It really is amazing how Kerry has been transformed from "some guy in the Senate" to "leader of the anti-war movement" in a matter of months. He was one of thousands of people involved in the movement at the time, and now everybody seems to be conveniently remembering him as a major player.

Second, you see how this rhetorical device allows her to insinuate that Kerry is a terrible human without having to actually explain why. In this particular instance, she does elaborate a tiny bit and say that Kerry's allegations were "irresponsible", but she doesn't really bother to explain how or why they were irresponsible.

Then, you had Hughes bringing up some really irrelevant (and apparently fabricated) shit to again insinuate that Kerry is of poor moral fiber. In a symbolic gesture back in the 70s, Kerry took some of the medals he'd been awarded during the war, threw them at the Capitol building, and left them there. Hughes, apparently not realizing that soldiers use the terms "ribbons" and "medals" interchangably, insinuates that Kerry only threw his "ribbons", while keeping his medals, thus proving that he's a big hypocrite. Actually, her exact words were "I think that's very revealing." Revealing of what? Don't ask Karen, her work here is done.

Then, finally we get Karen's most outrageous spin job about the recent pro-choice rally in Washington DC.

it's always an issue. And I frankly think it's changing somewhat. I think after September 11th the American people are valuing life more and realizing that we need policies to value the dignity and worth of every life...

And I think those are the kind of policies that the American people can support, particularly at a time when we're facing an enemy, and really the fundamental difference between us and the terror network we fight is that we value every life. It's the founding conviction of our country, that we're endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, the right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Unfortunately our enemies in the terror network, as we're seeing repeatedly in the headlines these days, don't value any life, not even the innocent and not even their own.

Yes, you heard right, abortion is terrorism. Well, she doesn't say it explicitly, she just leaves a bunch of dots, connects a few of em, let's your brain finish the picture.

A few bloggers bemoaned the lack of press coverage that this foul statement was getting. But really, it's getting the coverage it deserves. Karren Hughes should receive no media coverage whatsoever. She's a paid deceiver with an agenda, and talking to her does not get the public any closer to the truth. Why waste any time on her?