Rove to the Rescue

Steve Benen reacts to Karl Rove's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that urges Republicans to run in the fall on protecting the Bush tax cuts as the way to generate economic growth.

That's right -- Karl Rove's "jobs and prosperity" agenda encourages Republicans to, quite literally, support the Bush/Cheney "jobs and prosperity" agenda from the last decade.

There was no indication that Rove was kidding, or that his column was published as some kind of satire.

Look, I realize that Rove isn't the sharpest crayon in the box, but his advice to the GOP is so ridiculous on its face, I'm hard pressed to imagine why the Wall Street Journal published it. His argument is that the Bush/Cheney policies that already failed spectacularly might work if we just try them again.

How would Rove suggest paying for these tax cuts? The same way Rove dealt with this when he ran the White House: by not paying for them at all. The tax cuts that didn't create jobs and didn't generate economic growth did leave us with massive budget deficits, but that doesn't stop ol' Karl from insisting that the already-failed policies will this time make reducing deficits -- the deficits Rove left for Democrats to clean up -- "more manageable."

Republicans will win, Rove concludes, if they just tell voters we should go back to the policies we already know don't work. Bush failed miserably, but if we just give his painful failures one more try, everything will work out fine.

Honestly, maybe Karl Rove is just some kind of performance artist, hoping to make Republican pundits look foolish. It would make more sense than Rove actually believing this nonsense.