Poor Karl Rove! It’s been five months since his abject national humiliation and ol’ Karl still hasn’t given up hope.

Well, hope that no one will blame him for his spectacular failure, at any rate. To this end, Rove has been quietly pushing a the narrative that the ‘liberal’ mainstream media deliberately engaged in “voter suppression” by calling the election too early, thus driving conservative voters away from the polls in despair. It’s not clear how the fact that Fox News’ own analysts agreed plays into this fairy tale. Maybe they were seduced by Obama and his free Obama phones?

Either way, here’s Rove again, whining:

He’s also labeled Obama’s campaign attack ads “voter suppression.” Curiously, Romney’s attack ads have not been labeled as suppression nor have Rove’s only confident predictions of victory. Possibly because they didn’t work but more likely because they came from a Republican.





All joking aside, there is a very specific intent here on Rove’s part to dilute the definition of voter suppression. One of the great failures of the 2012 election was the over the top manner in which they set up roadblocks to the voting process. Republican controlled legislators in state after state cut early voting, made registration harder, demanded ID to defend against nonexistent voter fraud, threatened get out the vote drives with jail time and so on. They were so blatant about it that it didn’t really take much of an effort on the left’s part to publicize it. “Voter suppression” may not have been a large campaign issue but it certainly resonated with the public through social media.This, in turn, enraged the communities that were being targeted and they turned out in force. End result? Romney lost and Karl Rove melted down on live on TV.

The solution? Make the phrase “voter suppression” meaningless by making it part of the “both sides” meme. People tend not to punish one party or the other for attack ads or mud-slinging because both do it and people are generally not quite that hypocritical. Voter suppression, on the other hand, is solely a creature of the right. Robocalls that give false information on election dates and locations can certainly be done by the Democratic Party but they simply don’t bother. The more people vote, the better Democrats do. Conversely, the less people vote, the better for Republicans. This is why all genuine voter suppression comes from the right and almost always targets students, senior citizens and minorities, all of which vote Democratic.

By muddying the definition of “voter suppression” to include everything from attack ads to pre-election predictions, Rove hopes to remove the power the phrase has to motivate those actually being suppressed. After all, if both sides are doing it, it’s politics as normal, no big deal. Listen for this new definition of voter suppression to come into its own starting next year, heading into the midterm elections. You can be sure, just as the GOP ramps up its efforts to disenfranchise millions of Democratic voters, the right-wing media machine will be decrying all that dirty left-wing “voter suppression.”

And Karl Rove will be leading the charge.

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