Rove's last stand?

This one made me laugh. Rove, doing a statistical two step around reality, steps into a heckva cliche that has become shorthand for fraud and gross incompetence. He tried to dance his way out of it, but only made it worse.

EJ Dionne ignores the verbal blunder and zeroes in on the heart of Rove's travelogue into unreality.

Most astonishingly, Rove tried to make the case that Bush's tax cuts actually left the rich paying more. Everyone knows the Bush cuts in levies on dividends, capital gains and inheritances overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy. But here was Rove playing class politics by arguing that the wealthy now pay a larger share of total income taxes than they did before Bush.

This is statistical flimflam, of course. It leaves out payroll taxes, which hit most Americans the hardest. And the wealthy are paying more of the total share of income taxes, even though their rates are much lower, because their share of national income has gone up. Rove's numbers actually prove the rich are getting richer. But the fact that Rove tried to sound like William Jennings Bryan is the surest indicator that the administration is worried about its image as protector of the privileged.

Much as I loathe Rove, I've never thought of him as a useful fool. It's hard to believe he could publicly express such crass indifference to the economic degradation of the middle class. Surely Rove is not so stupid that he doesn't realize "repeating the propaganda" won't fill the empty pockets of the taxpayers. What was that definition of insanity again.....