Karl Rove’s Ashley Judd problem

[DonViejo]

The big loser of the 2012 campaign cycle is incapable of helping his party close the gender gap

BY DAVID BROCK

When activist and actress Ashley Judd recently announced she was mulling a run for senate against Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, Karl Rove revealed a strategy to undermine her. It would be one he’d used before with women candidates. “We’re making fun of her,” he explained.

Give him points for honesty. The key concept behind his super PAC’s first attack ad of the new election cycle was indeed to belittle the high-profile, politically-active Judd. Rove and American Crossroads GPS dropped $10,000 to “stick a pin in her balloon,” going up with a satiric Judd for Senate campaign spot that portrays her as an airhead, a “leader who knows how to follow,” and dismisses her as a silly Hollywood liberal.

Far from a unique personal shot at Judd, the attack is part of a long pattern of Rove attacking women in troubling ways rhetorically distinct from his campaigns against male candidates.

One can say that he is an equal opportunity smear artist, but there is a context and a history to Rove’s anti-Judd salvo. He routinely resorts to anti-woman insults and insinuations that cut deeper than his usual attacks – characterizing women in politics as having stereotypically negative female traits (subject to hysteria, too emotional, weak and weepy, bleeding heart, flighty or frigid, and lesbian).

On mainstream women’s issues, in the last year alone Rove claimed that Democrats “worship at the altar of reproductive rights,” compared President Obama to a “third-world dictator” for requiring insurance companies to cover birth control, and sneered at the White House’s priority to ensure equal pay for equal work as evidence of “unapologetic liberalism.”

more
http://www.salon.com/2013/02/19/karl_rove%E2%80%99s_ashley_judd_problem/

[Blanks]

1. Goodbye turtle man.

Take your turd blossom with you into obscurity.

[midnight]

2. She protects the mountain tops from surface mining... The coal companies are going to have

to find a P.R. firm that flies under the radar a little more quietly than Karl...

[winter is coming]

3. Have you seen the attack ads on Judd?

They're so lame, I initially thought they were satire.

McConnell's got all the appeal of a necrophiliac undertaker and he looks unhealthy. (His color's gotten a lot worse in the last year or two--either he's ill or his makeup artist is a Dem.) Don't know what folks in Kentucky think, but I think he's in trouble.

[DollarBillHines]

4. Considering the environment in which the weasel was raised

it's not too surprising that he has deep-seated problems with strong women.