Talk/Talk: Karl Rove and the Dialectic of History

Sunday, August 19, 2007

Every Sunday CUIP’s political director Jacqueline Salit and strategist and philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogue on Sunday, August 19, 2007 after watching "The Chris Matthews Show”, "Meet the Press” and "The McLaughlin Group.” To read it in its entirety, go to: www.independentvoting.org

Newman: Karl Rove didn’t control everything. Will he defend the positions they took? Yes, of course. They produced a war that was dreadfully managed and didn’t go well for them politically. But that is the consequence of empowering the right, as Rove did. That dialectic is simply the dialectic of history. Julius Caesar goes out and wants to conquer the world. He wins a lot of battles. He comes back home and says, “I won all this land and I’ve become very, very popular, so I think I’ll become the ruler of the entire world.” And the next thing you know, he’s stabbed and he’s dead. Was that part of his plan? I doubt it. Was that a consequence of his plan? Not exactly. But it was one of the possibilities created by the success of what he did.
Salit: Success can create illusions.
Newman: You don’t have the control that you might like to have, or might imagine that you have, or thought you would have, because you were the person who did some particular thing. But, that’s not how the world works. People create certain things and then certain things happen off of that....