gracchusdixit

Karl Rove, the man who got George W. Bush elected President of the United States, recently insinuated that Hillary Clinton had suffered brain damage as the result of a fall in 2012.  When challenged on the facts, he tried to fudge his errors and denied that he had ever used the words, “brain damage”.   The latter may be true in a strict sense, but it scarcely matters.  What Rove said was:  “Thirty days in the hospital?  And when she reappears, she’s wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury?  We need to know what’s up with that.”  Perhaps Rove sees a distinction between “brain damage” and “traumatic brain injury,” but it is doubtful that anyone else does.  The implication is identical, and the purpose is clear:  to suggest that mental incapacity may disqualify Hillary Clinton from becoming a Presidential candidate.  Indeed, Rove later said as much:  “This is going to be an issue in the 2016 election, whether she likes it or not.”

Rove’s insinuation is not only disgraceful but ridiculous on its face.  Whatever Hillary Clinton’s flaws may be, a lack of mental capacity isn’t one of them.  Moreover, for such a slur to come from a Republican political operative is deeply ironic.  It may be unkind to say so, but mental acuity was not George W. Bush’s strong suit, and Ronald Reagan’s mental lapses were the butt of innumerable jokes during his presidency—jokes that tragically morphed into reality when he succumbed to dementia after leaving office.

Much has been said about Rove’s long history of dirty tricks, but this is merely the latest iteration in a long tradition of Republican dirty tricks.  It was Richard Nixon who embraced slander and personal sabotage as a political philosophy and ultimately had to surrender the Presidency because of it.  It was Lee Atwater, the elder Bush’s campaign manager, who cooked up the infamous “Willie Horton” ad that dishonestly ended the candidacy of Michael Dukakis.  In slandering Hillary Clinton, Karl Rove is walking down a familiar road.

There is, nonetheless, something different about this particular dirty trick.  What makes it different is the sheer desperation it reveals.  Whether Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee, whether she even wants to become President, is still anyone’s guess.  But the Republicans are scared to death of the possibility.

There are three reasons for their terror.

First, if Hillary Clinton runs, she will be a formidable, perhaps an unbeatable, candidate.  The Clintons are the most popular political figures in the land, and no attempt by the Republicans to derail them has worked.  The “Whitewater scandal” turned out to be an empty fraud.  The soap-opera impeachment of Bill Clinton merely served to make him more popular.  And the only people paying attention to the endless drumbeat about “Benghazi” are crazy conspiracy theorists who believe the attack on the World Trade Center was engineered by the CIA and the Apollo 11 moon landing was filmed on a Hollywood sound stage.

Second, the Republican Party has no plausible candidate of its own.  Chris Christie, until recently the great white hope of the party’s big financial donors, may face criminal prosecution or impeachment before the next election.   Jeb Bush will never satisfy the spittle-spewing, government-bashing, minority-hating, and immigrant-loathing Republican “base”.  And the residual suspects—Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio—will never appeal to the general electorate.  Paul is a libertarian loon, Cruz is transparently ambitious demagogue, and Rubio is a damp dishrag who flits from one wishy-washy position to another.  The election is still two years off, and someone more credible may yet emerge.  But it seems unlikely.

Finally,  the Republican Party itself is intellectually bankrupt.   Its worn-out ideology of low taxes on the rich, no regulation on business, and no concessions on even the most obvious and pressing issues no longer convinces anyone.  Its refusal to acknowledge, let alone confront, climate change, income inequality, stagnating wages, and rampant gun violence has become a shameful embarrassment.   The simple truth is, the Republican Party ran out of ideas for solving the nation’s social and economic ills long ago.

What, then, are brainless Republicans left with as they face the prospect of a Clinton candidacy,?  Slander, innuendo, and character assassination.

One should never underestimate the gullibility of human beings, and it may be that these old tricks will work their dirty magic once again.  Somehow I doubt it.  The real brain damage in all this belongs to the man they once called “Bush’s Brain,” Karl Rove.