Some interesting takes on RoveGate, from Kevin Drum and Michael Totten. Both seem to get the truly outrageous part of his speech, where he accused liberals of treasonous conduct in opposing torture at G-mo and elsewhere. The part that seems to have everyone else exorcised (about how the liberal solution to the 9/11 strikes was based on "law enforcement" and "empathy") seems to me to be standard knuckle-dragging rhetoric from the far right, too banal to be taken as a credible attack, and as a criticism, unintentionally ironic: does Bush's Brain really want to go on record attacking the other side for its commitment to law enforcement and due process at a time when Osama bin Laden and other top leaders of Al Qaeda are celebrating their fourth year of freedom since the WTC fell, when the conservative solution to terrorism is to participate in an endless stalemate against arbitrary adversaries disconnected to the original attacks, and when the only justification that the soft-on-torture crowd seems to offer in defense of Abu Ghraib, G-mo and elsewhere is that we're not yet as bad as Stalin.

Exactly where does Karl Rove get his reputation for being a great genius anyways? This is the guy who had Bush sit on the ball with a double-digit lead in late-October, 2000, even going so far as to take days off from the campaign trail, only to see the lead collapse in the final two weeks; only a rigged vote count and some voting abuses in Florida that would have made Bull Connor proud saved his boss from a more embarrassing loss than Tom Dewey. Republicans maintained their majorities in Congress in both 2002 and 2004, due almost entirely to gerrymandering and the rural, small-state bias that dictates Senate elections (the dirty little secret of that "majority" right now is that Democratic candidates consistently receive more votes than their GOP counterparts in both the House and Senate). In spite of those majorities, they can still do little more than hit at New Deal and Great Society programs at the margins.

Even with a country at war and an improving economy last year, two factors which historically guarantee victory at the polls, Bush won by the narrowest reelection margin in history, against an unlikeable, politically-inept opponent (and a Massachusetts liberal, to boot), and managed to carry only one more state than he did last time, before 9/11. He has built the current Republican base on the least-productive, most-government dependent regions in the country, while pursuing a political strategy based on social wedge issues, particularly gay civil rights, that are heavily dependent on aging, reactionary voters who will have less sway as time passes.

Looking at the long term, color me unimpressed.