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Josh Marshall on the Rove methodology:

Now we can see in full view what we’ve seen again and again in recent years, the favored tactic: terror by grand moral inversion, the lie so total and audacious that it almost knocks opponents off their feet.

John Kerry decorated war hero? No, coward and showboat.

We noted yesterday the great article by Josh Green in the Atlantic last year in which Josh chronicled the tactic as Rove practiced it in races he ran down in Alabama in the 1990s. In one state supreme court race his candidate went up against an opponent who’d developed an impeccable reputation on child welfare issues (he was a former family court judge). Once you understand the pattern, the strategy suggests itself. Rove orchestrated a whispering campaign to spread the word that the man was a pedophile. Like I said, audacious.

And so here now. Wilson, a whistleblower administration officials were trying to punish? A whistleblower calling out White House manipulated intelligence during the lead-up to war?

Not at all. Rove was the whistleblower trying to knock down a campaign of disinformation from Joe Wilson. The audacity of it is enough to knock some people off their feet. Like I said, terror by grand moral inversion.

That is precisely the Rove technique.

It’s time for a thorough airing out of Rove’s career — the Swift Boat attacks, the whispering campaigns, including the lies about John McCain in South Carolina, even the “bug” planted in Rove’s office during one early campaign.

Usually, when one of these stories is discussed, people shrug it off. Politics is a nasty business, and sometimes the practitioners get into the gutter. No big surprise.

It is only when you see the entirety of Rove’s career that you really understand just what Rove is. Understanding that, you start to understand something about the people who hire him. That’s not good for Rove, it’s not good for Bush, and it’s not good for the Republicans now promoting the Rove line.

Time for the whole story.