Rove's tactics are not a secret. Beat the Democrats to the first punch, goon the attack and stay on the attack, keep the Democrats on the defensive and off balance. Don't worry about the Democrats attacking first and staying on the attack, because their liberal guilt complex makes them soft and they won't do that. This is as obvious as the blue sky from over two decades of Karl doing this.It's right out in the open, and still Democrats are such "nice guys" that they refuse to believe what is right in front of their noses. Bill Burkett KNOWS first-hand; he has been present at strategy discussions among Karl,Karen, Evans, and Allbaugh. That is why Rove went to such extraordinary efforts to set Bill up and discredit him - he knew that Bill is the one person in the Democratic camp who knows first-person how they operate, so he wanted to discredit Bill so Democratic strategists would not listen to him. Bill spent from March to August trying to get through to the Kerry campaign senior leadership to convince to them to jettison the nice-guy stuff, and one time he got through to Max Cleland but Max wouldn't listen. Then the set-up happened and after that the Democrats perfectly performed liberal guilt about "forged documents" (as if George Bush and Karl Rove have never falsified anything?) - just like Rove knew they would - and treated Bill like a leper.The way to beat Bush decisively was to go on the attack from Day One to expose his lifetime of fraudulence and power-hunger, and stay on it with no letup. Oh no, we were too good for that. Bush's lifetime of deceit and failure handed us this election on a silver platter. Oh no, we're too good to tell the truth about His Fraudulence. "That wouldn't be "positive." Some"independent" voters might be turned off by "negative" campaigning." "Or possibly it was, we can't attack Bush because he will attack back, and that's too risky." Come on, wake up, Democrats! After watching the Rovian strategies for a quarter of a century haven't you figured out that he is going to go on the attack no matter what we do? Don't you realize that our calls for "positive campaigning" are signs of weakness to those powerlusters? Don't you realize that our calls for "working together for common goals" just prove to them that they still have us fooled? And that such foolish moves simply encourage them to keep expanding their ever-expanding reach for power? Don't you realize that the only way to ever dislodge this Republican power machine from its ill-gotten power is to take it on, forcefully, aggressively, giving no quarter? No more Battered Democrat Syndrome!
