The L.A. Times did the right thing and corrected its grossly misleading headline in reference to Karl Rove's refusal to deny involvement in the Don Siegelman prosecution. However, Mark Impomeni at AOL News is refusing to correct his similarly misleading headline, "Rove Denies Tampering With Investigation", and even sites the L.A. Times in his defense when I confronted him in comments below the article.
This blog encourages others to further prod Mr. Impomeni to do the right thing, like the L.A. Times, and correct his currently propagandistic headline.
UPDATE: I have unsuccessfully lobbied (see comments section) Mark Impomeni to issue a correction (along with 99) and have now turned to the editors at AOL's "Political Machine" to fix the propaganda:
I have unsuccessfully tried to compel author MARK IMPOMENI to change his false and misleading headline, "Rove Denies Tampering With Investigation", which is pure unadulterated propaganda. The fact -- picked up by the blogospehere, news outlets around the internet and now the mainstream media (MSNBC) -- is that Rove refused to deny involvement in the Siegelman prosecution during an interview with George Stephanopoulos Sunday.
This was evidenced by the three attempts by Stephanopoulos to get Rove to make such a denial. Each time Rove refused and gave an unrelated answer. Stephanopoulos even stated at one point, "But that's not a denial." Stephanopoulos picked up on the obvious, something which Impomeni still has failed to do.
Also troubling was Impomeni's clear bias as evidenced by this line: "But what [Democrats] really want is the headline grabbing subpoena and [Rove's] refusal to testify in public". There are endless reasons for Democrats (and American citizens) to want Rove to testify. Not the least of which was the call from 52 former attorney's general for an investigation and the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals which found "substantial questions of fact and law" in the Siegelman case.
But to Impomeni it is really just a matter of Democrats scoring points!
Finally, in his defense, Impomeni twice sited the L.A. Times which ran a similar headline. And I can't help but agree that the L.A. Times should serve as an example. Today, the L.A. Times recognized its error and rectified the situation by running a correction. I encourage AOL to do the same.
Yesterday the blogosphere and many news outlets wrote about Karl Rove's shocking interview with George Stephanopoulos because Rove refused to deny his involvement in the Don Siegelman prosecution. As such, I was more than a bit surprised to read the L.A. Times headline about the interview:
"Karl Rove denies meddling in Siegelman investigation:Bush's former advisor says he didn't even know that the Justice Department had been pursuing the former Alabama governor, a Democrat since convicted for bribery, until he read of it in the paper."
This morning I wrote the following to the author of the piece, Richard B. Schmitt, and will update this if he replies.
Richard,
I am a blogger who has been covering the Siegelman case and the politicization of the Justice Department for some time. As such, I found Karl Rove's interview with George Stephanopoulos yesterday intriguing, as did many bloggers and news outlets, because Rove refused to deny involvement in the Siegelman prosecution.
However, that impression is exactly the opposite of the headline of your article in the L.A. Times. Rove, in fact, never "denie[d] meddling in [the] Siegelman investigation" and only admitted that he learned about the "prosecution" in the newspaper. The fact that Rove was evading this essential question was clear as day which is why Stephanopoulos followed up his question by stating, "But that's not a denial". And once again Rove refused to deny his involvement in the Siegelman prosecution.
Thus, your headline is not only false but extremely prejudicial and beneficial to Rove as it wrongly concludes and disseminates to the public the impression that Rove is answering all the pertinent questions and being straight forward. Will you please elaborate on how the headline was chosen and let me know if you will be issuing a correction.
UPDATE: Rick Schmitt replies and admits that Rove's answers were not a denial that preclude his potential involvement in the Siegelman case:
"Think he said he learned abt invest + indictment in papers -- which means he could have been involved somehow pre-invest.
Dunno abt headlines. U shd forward to our reader's rep. Tnks r"
I will now follow-up with the "reader's rep" and report back any further correspondence.
UPDATE 2: The L.A. Times Readers' Representative forwards my complaint to the headlines editor:
Dear Sir or Madame:
The headline to the article today about Karl Rove by Richard Schmitt is false and misleading which he has so much as admitted to me in email. Please see our email exchange below and inform me of if and when you plan to run a correction. Thank you, Alan Breslauer
Jamie Gold (L.A. Times):
Thanks, Mr. Breslauer, I'll send this to the editors who write the headlines now for their attention.
Jamie Gold
Readers' Representative
UPDATE 3: The L.A. Times issues a correction! Even though they misquote their own headline in the correction:
Karl Rove: In Section A on Monday, an article about Karl Rove said he brushed off suggestions that he attempted to influence a Justice Department investigation and prosecution of Don Siegelman, former Democratic governor of Alabama. The headline went further than the article by saying, "Rove says he didn't intervene in probe."
This morning, on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Karl Rove refused to deny his involvement in the Don Siegelman prosecution. And laughingly so. Check out the short video (2:28) above and the transcript below:
George Stephanopoulos (quoting the House Report): “the question for Mr. Rove is whether he directly or indirectly discussed the possibility of prosecuting Don Siegelman with the Justice Department or Alabama Republicans.” Did you?
Karl Rove: ...First of all, uh, I have said, uh, I learned about Don Siegelman's prosecution by reading about it in the newspaper...
Stephanopoulos: But to be clear, you did not contact the Justice Department about this case?
Rove: Uh, I, I've read about, I'm going to simply say what I've said before which is, I found out about Don Siegelman's investigation and indictment by reading about it in the newspaper.
Stephanopoulos: But that's not a denial.
Rove: Uh, I, I've, I've, I've, uh, you know, I've read about, I've heard about, read about it, learned about it for the first time by reading about it in the newspaper.
Karl Rove is the ultimate partisan operative who guided a career underachiever with a checkered past to the White House. He is credited with keeping the 2000 election close enough, through dirty campaigning and still dirtier election engineering and fraud, to allow the Supreme Court to step in and gift wrap the presidency for his boss. Suffice to say no one uses dirty tricks more effectively or more often than Karl Rove. As such, many Americans who care about the Constitution, Democracy, the rule of law and plain decency, long ago concluded that Karl Rove sucks.
Rove loved the praise bestowed upon him from his friends and foes alike. But then everything came crashing down around him and now his “genius” moniker is in serious need of repair. In an astonishing turn of events, Republicans lost both the House and the Senate in 2006 despite Rove's repeated assurances to the contrary:
“I’m looking at all of these [races] and adding them up. I add up to a Republican Senate and Republican House. You may end up with a different math but you are entitled to your math and I’m entitled to the math” - Karl Rove (10/24/06)
Meanwhile, George W. Bush's approval ratings have been on a steady decline and now rest at 30%, 1% above their all time low.
It is hardly surprising that all of the GOP presidential candidates continue to distance themselves from Bush's body. Worse, Rove's permanent majority has been replaced by a public that favors the Democratic Party over the GOP by a whopping 50% to 35% margin. And independents favored Democrats in 2006 by an even larger 57% to 39% margin. It seems that the politics of hate, racism, division, war, war-mongering, propaganda, cheating, lying and stealing can only take a party so far.
But Rove will not go down without a fight. And thankfully propaganda rags like the ridiculous Newsweek magazine have given Rove a platform to win back his genius (In Newsweek's defense, it is not Time magazine). Despite the new gig, Rove proved to be every bit the partisan with his first column: “How to Beat Hillary (Next) November”:
“And so the question to John McCain from a woman at a town hall in South Carolina last Monday was tasteless, but key: ”How do we beat the [rhymes with witch]?“ Right now, Republicans are focusing much of their fire on Senator Clinton. Criticizing her unites the party, stirs up the unsettled feelings many swing voters have toward her and allows each candidate to say why he is best able to beat her.
For now, that's enough. But when a GOP nominee emerges, he needs to remember no Republican is as well known as Hillary. The Republican has room to grow in the polls as voters get a better sense of who he is and what animates him. Here's what he needs to do.”
The truth is that Karl Rove and the entire Republican Party are salivating at the opportunity to face off against Hillary Clinton and her “high negatives”. And why not, in a Zogby Poll released last week, Hillary now loses in the general election to all five GOP frontrunners while Barack Obama handily defeats the same five:
With this backdrop it seems clear as day that one should take Rove's latest piece in the Financial Times, “Memo to Obama: win Iowa or lose the race”, with many grains of salt:
“Not that you have asked for advice, but here it is anyway: Iowa is your chance to best her. If you do not do it there, odds are you never will anywhere.”
And Rove's stellar advice:
First, stop acting like a vitamin-deficient Adlai Stevenson. Striking a pose of being high-minded and too pure will not work. Americans want to see you scrapping and fighting for the job, not in a mean or ugly way but in a forceful and straightforward way.
Hillary may come over as calculating and shifty but she looks in control. You, on the other hand, often come over as weak and ineffectual. In some debates, you do not even look at her when disagreeing with her, making it look as if you are afraid of her. She offers you openings time and again but you do not take advantage of them. Sharpen your attacks and make them more precise.
Please! Could Rove give any worse advice than to turn the nice-guy, above the fray, uniter that is Obama into, well, Karl Rove? All can plainly see that Rove is rightfully scared of Obama whom he admits has “the buzz” and could very well win the nomination and upset Rove's plans to keep the White House in GOP hands. And as Frank Rich so ably points out, facing off against Obama would be a far more difficult task than defeating Hillary:
But much like the Clinton campaign itself, the Republicans have fallen into a trap by continuing to cling to the Hillary-is-inevitable trope. They have not allowed themselves to think the unthinkable — that they might need a Plan B to go up against a candidate who is not she. It’s far from clear that they would remotely know how to construct a Plan B to counter Mr. Obama. The repeated attempts to fan “rumors” that he is a madrassa-indoctrinated Muslim — whether on Fox News or in The Washington Post, where they resurfaced scurrilously on the front page on Thursday — are too demonstrably false to survive endless reruns even in the Swift-boating era.
Part of the Republicans’ difficulty in countering Mr. Obama, should they have to, is their own cynical racial politics. For the most part, race has been the dog that hasn’t barked in this campaign despite the (largely) white press’s endless fretting about whether the Illinois senator is too white for black voters and too black for white voters. Most Americans aren’t racist, most Republicans included. (Those who are won’t vote for the Democratic presidential candidate even if it’s not Mr. Obama.) But the G.O.P., by its own doing, is nonetheless saddled with a history that most recently includes “macaca” and Katrina, Mr. Bush’s appearance at Bob Jones University in 2000 and the nonexistent black population of its Congressional delegation.
As the Republican leadership knows, this record is an albatross, driving away not just black voters but crucial white swing voters, too. Ken Mehlman, the former G.O.P. chairman, and Mr. Rove, as recently as in that Newsweek column, have implored their party to reach out to minorities. So have Newt Gingrich and Jack Kemp. But not even conservative leaders of this stature could persuade their party’s top 2008 presidential contenders to show up for a September debate moderated by Tavis Smiley for PBS at the historically black Morgan State University.
So the polls emphatically prove that Hillary would be far easier prey for Republicans in the general election than Obama. And if statistics aren't your thing, commonsense clearly dictates the same. And finally, just about every political pundit from Karl Rove to Frank Rich have written as much. So what does Wolf Blitzer of the Clinton News Network wonder about Karl Rove's latest advice column?:
OMG! He is actually taking Rove's words at face value! LOL! Could Wolf really believe that Rove has forsaken his legacy as the greatest partisan political operative of the last 20 year in order to go legit and is now an uninterested, outsider, merely commenting on the political landscape? ROTFL! Yeah, that's the ticket, Rove couldn't possibly have ulterior motives.
The way I see it, there are two possible explanations for Wolf's comments: 1) he is an imbecile, or 2) he wants Hillary to get the nomination. Either way, he should be laughed out of his job. Of course, this is nothing new from Wolf or the Clinton News Network which showed its true colors at the last democratic debate in Nevada:
To be fair to Wolf and CNN, avid Clintonites like George Stephanopoulos, who formerly helped Bill Clinton get elected President and served as his communications director before moving on to become Chief Washington Correspondent for ABC News and host of his own Sunday morning show, also spew the same nonsense:
All of which makes Barack Obama's campaign for the presidency all the more remarkable. He continues to rise in the polls and threatens to win Hillary's “inevitable” nomination despite having to fight against Karl Rove, the entire Republican Party, the Clinton machine, CNN, Wolf, ABC, George and most of the mainstream media.
If the Illinois Senator can overcome those long odds he certainly has what it takes to lead the country.
