Karl Rove "Roves-out" More False Drivel To Fox News Viewers

Bush did it better. Seriously, Karl Rove?

Karl Rove and Fox News continue to malign President Obama with George W. Bush (of all presidents) as the whipping rod. Despite growing concern for Bush Administration and CIA involvement violations of international law (torture), we continue to hear comment and advice from the un-credible and shadowy Right. We continue to hear from GOP operatives as they disparage President Obama, despite  Bush Administration economic policy and fiscal malfeasance that contributed to a worldwide economic collapse and unjustifiable wars. From Dick Cheney, through Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and the ever-present Karl Rove the barrage of inane drivel from the “dealers of doom, flows like an out of control freight train.

But, as the old adage goes….“That dog don’t bark.” 

Carnival barking from Rove isn’t possible without a dedicated platform from which to spew rhetoric. Fox News managers and viewers partake in a symbiotic purveyor/sycophant relationship on a daily basis.  From time to time Fox programmers will schedule major right-wing operatives to feed its viewers unadulterated garbage. There are no GOP operatives more adroit at manipulation, GOP political subterfuge and outright carnival barking political garbage than Karl Rove. Rove served eight years with George W. Bush. He “no way” a credible person. Rove should have been investigated as a co-conspirator to US torture and he should have been publicly condemned for his role in the 2007/08 Bush economic collapse towards. Yet, we have to deal with his bull crap annoyances via Fox News’s need to feed its viewers. What better feeding arena than Sunday Morning GOP news shows. 

Progressive social media should spread Rove’s lack of veracity and manipulation far and wide.

Rove sat for Fox News Sunday (this past weekend) and laid more B/S across the ears, eyes and brains of people who obviously seek weekly doses of Obama Derangement feed. The Fox News Sunday feeding was laced with Rovian “bull” pureed with large amounts of George W. Bush fallacy.

The Tampa Bay Times investigated Rove’s disparaging remarks about President Obama’s handling of international crisis in the context offered by Rove: George W Bush handled such crisis more effectively. 

The Truth-O-Meter Says:

After Russia went to war with Georgia in 2008, the U.S. sent a “very strong message” to Vladimir Putin by sending “warships to the Black Sea” and airlifting “combat troops that Georgia had in Afghanistan” back to Georgia.

Karl Rove on Sunday, March 16th, 2014 in an interview on “Fox News Sunday”

Karl Rove says George W. Bush had a more muscular stance against Putin in 2008 Georgia crisis than Barack Obama has had over Crimea

A Russian military convoy moves past a horse-drawn cart with local residents outside Gori, Georgia, on Aug. 13, 2008. (Associated Press)

Russia and Georgia have had tense relations since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Some Republicans have been critical of President Barack Obama’s handling of Russia and President Vladimir Putin recently. The critics say that Obama has appeared weak in the face of Russia — first, when it sent troops into the Ukrainian region of Crimea, and then when it quickly acted to annex the territory.

For instance, on Fox News Sunday, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said the Obama administration “is creating an air of permissiveness” toward Russian expansionism. “We do need to show long-term resolve.”

Another Fox News Sunday guest, Republican strategist Karl Rove, took the opportunity to contrast Obama’s actions with those of Rove’s old boss, President George W. Bush. Rove suggested that Bush’s policies were more muscular and effective in countering Putin’s Russia.

Read more aftefr the break below

Specifically, in 2008, while Bush was serving his final year in office, he faced a foreign-policy crisis that in some ways echoed what’s been happening more recently in Crimea. The conflict involved Russia; Georgia, a former Soviet Republic that was by then independent; and two separatist regions within Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

After several years of restiveness by Russian-backed rebels in South Ossetia, the Georgian government made a military push that attempted to retake control of the region in August 2008. Russia responded militarily, successfully pushing back Georgian troops from both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Clashes continued for a week, including in portions of Georgia beyond the two breakaway regions, until France helped broker a peace deal. Russia then recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as sovereign nations, though most other countries have not taken that step.

So how did Bush respond as hostilities were erupting in Georgia? Here’s Rove’s recollection:

“I think the 2008 experience is instructive. … What the United States did was it sent warships to the Black Sea, (and) it took the combat troops that Georgia had in Afghanistan and airlifted them back, sending a very strong message to Putin that you’re going to be facing combat-trained, combat-experienced Georgian forces. And not only that, but the United States government is willing to give logistical support to get them there. And this stopped (Russian troops) at … the two enclaves, and they did not make a move at Tbilisi. We need similar strong movement now.”

We’ll take a look at two of the moves Rove said Bush made — sending “warships to the Black Sea” and airlifting “the combat troops that Georgia had in Afghanistan” back to Georgia.

Sending warships to the Black Sea

The United States — and its military alliance, NATO — did indeed have ships in the Black Sea near Georgia in August 2008, but the story behind their presence is more nuanced than an unmistakable show of force against Russian aggression.

There was little question that the United States backed the Georgian position in the conflict. The United States had been a staunch supporter of Georgia and its military ever since Georgia became independent, and Bush, speaking from the Beijing Olympics, said, ”Georgia is a sovereign nation, and its territorial integrity must be respected. We have urged an immediate halt to the violence and a stand-down by all troops. We call for the end of the Russian bombings.”

However, the military actions taken by the United States to back up these words were more cautious. For instance, the administration sent the guided missile destroyer McFaul to the Georgian port of Batumi, but it was loaded with humanitarian aid, according to a report in the Aug. 28, 2008, New York Times:

In essence, the United States was walking a tightrope between showing military defiance and offering a more humanitarian face. The Times called this balance “delicate.”

“At the time, these gestures were not viewed as particularly strong,” said Lincoln Mitchell, who was chief of party for the National Democratic Institute in Georgia from 2002 to 2004 and is now affiliated with the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, Mitchell said, “complained throughout the war that he was not getting support.”

It’s also worth noting that a portion of the western military presence in the Black Sea was already in place before the conflict erupted. For instance, NATO said that four of its warships were in the Black Sea because of previously scheduled anti-terrorist and anti-piracy exercises.

Airlifting Georgian combat troops from Afghanistan

There was in fact an airlift of Georgian military personnel — but it wasn’t from Afghanistan. It was from another country where the United States and its allies were fighting a war: Iraq.

On Aug. 11, 2008, Agence France-Presse reported that the United States military had “nearly completed” the airlift of 2,000 Georgian troops from Iraq to Georgia.

Here, too, the United States took pains to portray its actions as being limited rather than aggressive.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters that the United States was “fulfilling our agreement with the Georgian government that, in an emergency, we will assist them in redeploying their troops. We are honoring that commitment.”

Whitman told reporters at the time that the 130 U.S. troops and military contractors who were already in the country to train Georgian troops had been brought together at an undisclosed location away from the hostilities.

And Whitman made clear to reporters that — contrary to allegations by Putin — the U.S. was not flying the Iraq-based Georgian troops to the war zone.

It’s not clear that Russia was all that worried about the troops airlifted from Iraq, regardless of Putin’s rhetoric, Mitchell said. “The troops from Iraq were not exactly combat ready to fight against Russia, nor was Putin concerned about those troops,” he said.

David L. Phillips, director of Columbia University’s program on peace-building and rights, expressed skepticism about Rove’s suggestion that the United States’ response in 2008 was so strong that it essentially stopped Russian troops in their tracks.

“There was never any chance of the Bush administration going to war in Georgia, and everybody knew that,” he said. “It was for show. It would be misleading to suggest that our response was so robust that it deterred further aggression.”

Our ruling

Rove said that after Russia went to war with Georgia in 2008, the U.S. sent a “very strong message” to Putin by sending “warships to the Black Sea” and airlifting “the combat troops that Georgia had in Afghanistan” back to Georgia.

In reality, the military message sent by the warship movements was deliberately fuzzed by having the vessels carry humanitarian aid. Meanwhile, the airlift of Georgian troops from Iraq — not Afghanistan, as Rove had said — was carefully calibrated not to deposit them where they could quickly face off against Russian forces.

Contemporary accounts and experts agree that Rove was spinning what was actually a modest and nuanced military response into something more forceful. The truth is that Bush was geopolitically hamstrung — just as Obama is now — by facing a nuclear-armed, expansion-minded Russia willing to intervene militarily in countries on its own doorstep, but far from our own. We rate Rove’s claim Mostly False.