Yes, you did. Which is why I said “much outcry” as opposed to denying any outcry at all. John Mace also spoke up against it.
Measure that tepid response against the immediate and violent rebuttal conservative arguments get here even when they’re on half-solid ground.
Soon?
:dubious: “Can’t point to a similar tactic being used by him, ever”?
I’m not speculating on the likelihood of Rove’s involvement in the Rather memos thing, but I think it’s a real stretch to attempt to claim that Rove doesn’t have a well-attested history of using lies and slimeball tricks to discredit political opponents.
A key point about the Rather forgeries is that they deflected attention from a real story (that Bush impugned a war hero, but was himself a shirker) to an irrelevancy (since Rather wasn’t running for office).
But this point is unrelated to the question of Rove’s sliminess and certainly to the topic of this thread, which is how to reconcile the pretence to objectivity of Bricker and others with a refusal to acknowledge Rove’s sliminess.
Bricker, you “do not admire all of Rove’s tactics.” Several of his tactics have been detailed in this thread. Would you care to point to the ones you do admire?
Debate seems to have devolved into the question of whether I was disingenuous to write both
[QUOTE=septimus]
I still think it’s likely that Karl Rove, or one of his fans, was responsible for the forged memo.
…
I’m unaware that anyone here, including myself, has implied that “Rove probably did this.”
[/QUOTE]
Note that deflecting the topic of Rove’s sliminess to Septimus’ language has an uncanny similarity to deflecting Bush’s shirking to the Rather forgeries. 
But to address the charge:
I still think that “Karl Rove or one of his fans” is sufficiently different from “Karl Rove” to absolve septimus and, moreover, the real points I’ve made stand even if we were certain Rove was not involved in the forgery itself.
But, though off-topic, I’ll comment on the relationship between “probable” and “likely.”
I do try to be “precise” even with such fuzzy words, and in fact I’ve long thought “probable” implied a higher minimal likelihood than “likely.” I Googled to see if I’ve been wrong all these years. This source regards the two words as synonymous, and I will try to treat them so in future. The only other source I found Googling, however, does show “likely” as 25%-100% (median 75%), “highly probable” as 60%-100% (median 90%) and, unfortunately, assigns no meaning to plain “probable.”
Generic lies are not the same thing as crafting a forgery that implicates your own side and then planting on the opposition in the hope it will be used. It’s such a gamble: the forgery has to be good enough to convince the other side its genuine but obvious enough that your own side’s denials will be completely convincing.
Where had he done anything like THAT before or since?
Your claim seems to be that he’s lied before, and all lies are the same.
From this thread? No.
But from his career? Sure. He pushed gubernatorial candidate Bush to highlight Governor Ann Richards’ opposition to the concealed weapon bill put forth by Texas State Representative Suzanna Hupp. You may see this as some kind of perfidious tactic, but there’s nothing wrong with the truth. He also highlighted Richards’ yes-and-no flipflops on moving certain Texas waterways to federal control, which was highly relevant to development possibilities in the middle of the state.
The description of the tactic in the first See campaign mentioned in my previously cited excerpt, though, wasn’t just a “generic lie”: it was a carefully planned “source misdirection” trick where Rove’s campaign deliberately smeared its own candidate in a repulsive way to make it look like the opposition did it.
No, that’s not exactly the same tactic as the one used in the Rather memo forgeries, but that isn’t the criterion you originally stated. You were claiming that the Rove detractors couldn’t “point to a similar tactic being used by him, ever” or “anything like that before or since” (emphasis added).
And I think the example I mentioned, for instance, is similar enough to prove you wrong about that. It shares with the Rather memo forgeries the characteristics of smearing one’s own side and making it look like a transparent dirty trick by the opposition.
If you now want to move the rhetorical goalposts by claiming that “similarity” or “likeness” of tactics obviously requires some previously unstated specific point of resemblance that doesn’t happen to exist in the example I cited, nobody will be in the least surprised.
Well, I admit I didn’t actually read through your quote.
And having drawn my attention back to it, I admit that this tactic, if true, was a very close to what we’re talking about here.
So, no, I won’t move any goalposts. This does indeed meet the qualifications I laid out.
I will only say that (unless I missed it AGAIN) your information was not posted when I first made that claim.
Er… was it? (If I missed that also, this isn’t going to go well).
I posted the same story in OP, as well as in the thread to which this whole thread was a reaction.
I felt your claim that Rove hadn’t engaged in similar tricks was strange nit-picking. I’m relieved to note you simply missed that story altogether … though disconcerted to learn you’ve been defending Rove and attacking me without knowing the first thing about Rove’s slime.
Um…
Um…
Yeah. Well, needless to say, I withdraw any comments I made about there not being any similar allegations against Rove before.
Missing that tidbit twice (at least) was inexcusable. So I have no excuse.
Mind you, I still object to the “probable” or “likely” claim, but I absolutely admit that Rove’s been accused of a similar tactic before this.
Thank you, Bricker. Sorry I was snarky.
Not at all. Snarkiness was the least that omission deserved.
I believe the most likely thing that happened in the memos case is that Burkett provided them, since he really was just that nuts, was obsessed with Bush, and the memos were faxed from a Kinko’s relatively close to his home.
By saying that I am not excluding other possibilities, but these would have to be more convincing than this one on the evidence provided before becoming a more likely scenario to me. I haven’t seen this yet.
In any case, whoever provided the memos, CBS should have done a far better job than they did authenticating them.
(ETA: I’ll admit to being too easily irritated by people who ignorantly argue against my posts. Feel free to ignore me. If instead your reflexes lead you to “I know nothing about the subject, but guess Septimus is wrong” the chance is close to 99% that you are wrong. Please start a PIt thread against me, and I’ll give examples.)
Yes, it was posted. It was posted in the thread to which the OP of this thread links and it was posted in the OP of this thread itself.
So let’s recapitulate. You’ve been defending a disgusting slimeball without even condescending to learn the first thing about him. You are happy to argue against me on a matter you now admit you know nothing about, that you have made no effort to learn about, not even reading the OP against which you argue. :smack:
Once I had respect for you. Now I’ll think of you as just another right-winger who “doesn’t need to learn anything because you already know the answers.”
Sorry for not responding to your insolence in a more timely fashion. Frankly, I was stunned to learn you’d been blathering on without any attempt to first inform yourself. Previously I’d thought of you as about the only right-winger at SDMB with even a soupçon of intellectual honesty.
I give you credit for now admitting that you’d been blathering nonsense because you felt no need to inform yourself. That’s more than other right-wingers here would have done. But it would be nice to hear a sincere apology, or even a Roseanne Roseannadanna “Nevermind!”
It took you over a year to write that? Didn’t Bricker already post a retraction to you in post #90? What the fuck, septimus
What year came between February 2012 and March 2012? It was so short I totally missed it.
Would you believe I forgot to factor in Daylight Savings?
Whoops. Sorry, septimus.